V-F-X Ljubljana
Screening of film/video oeuvre 1989–2024
Screening and talk (in English)
Saturday, 17 May 2025, 7 pm
Slovenian Cinematheque, Miklošičeva cesta 28, Ljubljana
and at Slovenian Film Database (BSF) (17 – 24 May 2025)
Nataša Prosenc Stearns is a filmmaker and video artist who works with a wide range of moving image production and presentation, from scriptwriting, filming and editing to spatial installations, video objects and prints. The exhibition of Nataša Prosenc Stearns’ film and video oeuvre, entitled Between Body and Space, is a selection of her works comprising four programmes, and at the V-F-X Ljubljana festival, we will present the third one, Vertical Horizon. This series presents works that live double lives, as gallery installations and as film or video objects, with the dramaturgy in the installation happening through the visitor’s movement through the space. Her works in the Vertical Horizon programme focus on the body’s materiality, which begins to disintegrate into parts, merge with other bodies into indistinct masses through the multilayering of images, and dissolve into basic elements, with water predominating in her oeuvre.
Alongside the Cinematheque screening, a parallel programme of her works will be available online at the Slovenian Film Database (BSF, bsf.si), complementing the first three programmes.
Between Body and Space III: Vertical Horizon
The body begins to disintegrate into parts, to merge with other bodies into indistinct masses, to dissolve into essential elements: in Crossing, the face dissolves into bubbles of water that look like pixels; in Border, the back turns into a desert; in Night Spring, the mouth disintegrates into a mound and returns to a mouth that could also be a wound… Everything is in constant flux, a logic of visual metaphor.
In the metaphor, the back becomes a desert; the mouth becomes a mound. The metaphor, then, explodes established concepts and boundaries from within and enables the metamorphosis of an object into something else, thereby establishing a particular fundamental interconnectedness of things. To continue Timothy Morton’s thought from Hyperobjects: the future and the past are already present, there is already here, the other is already me, and things, objects, and their parts are already mutating.
This series presents works that live double lives, as gallery installations and as film or video objects. Here, the artist creates her works in parallel for different media, with the dramaturgy in the installation happening through the visitor’s movement through the space. In contrast, the narrative establishes the dramaturgy in the film.
Vertical Horizon, for example, was conceived as a labyrinth with low walls in the gallery space where the screens were placed. At the same time, the film recreates the labyrinthine feeling with silhouettes in a dark space, where the camera travels along the wall in an ever-closer close-up, while we can only hear the footsteps without seeing their bearers.
The Border project has gone through various gallery incarnations, where monitors with loops of different videos have been placed on the floor to recreate the feeling of a water surface. The film achieves this fluidity through the transition of two bodies into one and the abstraction of particular body parts through extreme close-ups. In the artist’s later 2010 film Going Where, the gradation towards the close-up becomes the central formal process of abstraction, in which both the boundaries between different objects and the boundaries between the parts of that object are lost.
Robert Kuret
We thank the RTV Slovenia archive for loaning film copies. Robert Kuret will talk with Nataša Prosenc Stearns.
USA/Slovenia, 2005, HD video, 16:9, colour, 5′
A close-up of a face is covered with a layer of tracks of fire and water.
USA, 2016, HD video, 16:9, colour, 2′
The mouth turns into a volcano/crater, which in turn turns the whole body into an earth/planet.
USA, 2015, HD video, 16:9, colour, 3′
Wishing Well and Night Spring are video installations that show images of the human body’s exterior and interior. They are beaming with a variety of pains and pleasures and walk the line between the real and the imaginary.
USA, 2015, HD video, 16:9, colour, 3′
Wishing Well and Night Spring are video installations that show images of the human body’s exterior and interior. They are beaming with a variety of pains and pleasures and walk the line between the real and the imaginary.
Slovenia, 1996, video Betacam, 3:4, colour, 5′
The video focuses on the concept of skin, which is the borderline between the body and its surroundings.
USA, 2016, HD video, 16:9, colour, 3′
Isolated from the rest of the body, several torso layers travel over the screen.
Slovenia, 1994, video Betacam, 3:4, colour, 3′
curtesy of Umetnostna galerija Maribor
The back of a butoh dancer. We observe the movement of the human body, which transforms into a moving muscular mass, suggesting skeleton and tissue, playing with the sculptural model, with the organic and holistic quality of the human body and moving into the very structure of the skin and showing the exact structure of the body as a kind of ripple.
USA, 2015, HD video, 16:9, colour, 3′
Methuselah is one of the oldest living trees and grows 9800 ft above sea level in Bristlecone Pine Forrest in the Californian White Mountains. Together with other ancient pines in the forest, Methuselah survived over 4000 years. As centuries pass and the elements batter the trees, they become sculpted into astonishing shapes.
USA, 2023, HD video, 16:9, colour, 10′
In the Middle Ages, a misericorde was a weapon to put a wounded knight out of his misery. As a theological term, it refers to forgiveness and compassion. The film inhabits the dreamscape of an insomniac, moving through a land of distorted mirrors, fluctuating boundaries, and uncertain identities.
USA, 2015, HD video, 16:9, colour, 3′
A Hollywood star poses for her fans – on a red carpet of her own making.
Slovenia, 1995, video Betacam, 3:4, colour, 3′
People participate in mass rituals, primarily wars and the glorification of leaders, which are constant and universal documents of the world.
USA, 2010, HD video, 16:9, colour, 2′
The constant flow of travel.
USA, 2013, HD video, 16:9, colour, 3′
In a way, the noise is produced in a physical ratio, created between intimate and public or closed and open spaces.
Slovenia, 1995, video Betacam, 3:4, 6′
A man and a woman aim to fulfil their desire for power, beauty, supremacy and other similar human attributes.
Slovenia, 1994, Betacam video, 3:4, bw, 3′
The figures never come from ‘behind the walls’ of the labyrinth; we can only hear the sound of their fleeting steps.
USA, 2017, HD video, 16:9, colour, 3′
The silhouette of the male figure is in the rhythm of a steady stream.
USA, 2017, HD video, 16:9, colour, 8′
The rising and ever-migrating population on a progressively more damaged and claustrophobic planet.
USA, 2024, HD video, 16:9, colour, 1′
Haiku video from the Horizons series.
Between Body and Space III: Vertical Horizon
17 – 24 May
» View at Slovenian Film Database (BSF)
The third programme of the review of Nataša Prosenc Stearns’ film/video oeuvre focuses on her shorter experimental works, which often live double lives, i.e., as gallery installations. In this programme, we will get an insight into the artist’s works in this field, some of which are gallery doubles for the films that will be screened at the Slovenian Cinematheque: for example, the project Big Brother’s Room, which was the source of the film Disc, or Vertical Horizon, Border, Crossing and Run City, which were the basis for the short experimental films of the same name. Thus, through the documentation of video and gallery installations, we can gain additional insight into the artist’s other field of work, from which her film works have also emerged.
video installation, co-producer Galerija Božidar Jakac, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia, Kanalya Pictures, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2005, 1′ 55”
A multi-channel installation showing the dissolution of images by fire and water. The first part consists of pictures of a hanging human body fusing with flames. The shapes and colours of the fire and the skin merge, and soon there is no longer any difference between them. The second part shows enlarged faces with traces of fire and water spreading over their surface and sections of the installation in space.
video installation, TV Slovenija, Regionalni RTV center Maribor, Slovenia; Exhibition Modra roka, Galerija Jakopič Ljubljana; Raum fur Kunst, Graz, Austria; Beta SP, 3:4, colour, 1997, 2′ 57”
Body parts begin to live their own abstract lives, for which they have freed themselves of the usual restrictions of the body.
video installation, TV Slovenija, LACE, Los Angeles / Likovni salon, Celje / Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana, USA / Slovenia; BetaSP, 3:4, colour, 1996 / 1997 / 2019, 2′ 45”
Leadership, the leading of masses, is a trauma rooted in the psyche of people living in post-Communist societies. Whose marionettes are we, and how free can our decisions be? These are questions of universal significance. The images of crowds, who in the name of different ideas, gods or leaders, release their passions, are transformed into nameless masses.
TV Slovenija, video installation in Mala galerija, Ljubljana, Razstavni salon Rotovž Maribor, Slovenia; BetaSP, 3:4, colour, 1997, 1998, 3′ 10”
A two-channel video installation depicting the story of Sisyphus.
TV Slovenija, video installation, Galerija Jakopič Ljubljana, Slovenia; BetaSP, 3:4, colour, 1994, 2′ 34”
A four-channel video installation with images of people looking for a way out of a maze of concrete bricks.
video installation, Galerija Miklova hiša, Ribnica / Gallery 825, Los Angeles / Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Slovenija / ZDA / Izrael; BetaSP, 3:4, colour, 1998 / 2000 / 2009, 1′ 55”
A two-channel projection on orthogonally placed screens shows the shadows of bodies passing in an urban environment, mirrored on the desert floor below. But somehow they don’t match. The shadows, freed from nature, follow their path.
video installation on a public metro staircase, New Town Art, Pasadena, USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2017, 2′ 21”
Installation/Projection was a part of Vladimir’s Underpants, an exhibition in public stairwells of Old Pasadena, Newtown Arts, Pasadena, USA on October 28, 2017.
loop for video installation, USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2020, 4′ 20”
Video meditation created in isolation during a pandemic. For years, the artist has been recording and archiving video and audio material with ideas she later articulated and edited into videos, films, and installations. The video is designed for vertical projection and is the first of a series of works emerging in an atmosphere of global health crisis and social distancing.
SPY-Safe Place for Youth, USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2015, 3′ 43”
Reposition is a group video portrait of five members currently involved in Venice YouthBuild, a program providing education and job training to out-of-school and out-of-work youth to help them reposition into successful adulthoods. The video was produced in collaboration with The Mirror Mirror Project.
The video belongs to a series of “migrating frames” – short videos that do not have a narrative structure. The artist says of them that “they come from spontaneous recordings of things and events in my surroundings. They are made on the spot, in everyday life, when an idea is born out of real-life circumstances. Like haiku poetry, haiku videos are based on direct observations of objects or incidents, which I then edit and complete into meaningful wholes.”
USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2022, 1′ 10”
Haiku video from the Horizons series.
USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2022, 1′ 28”
Haiku video from the Horizons series.
USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2024, 1’ 20”
Haiku video from the Horizons series.
USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2024, 1′ 54”
Haiku video from the Horizons series.
USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2024, 1′ 38”
Haiku video from the Horizons series.
Photo: Asiana Jurca Avci
Nataša Prosenc Stearns: Between Body and Space
Programme at Slovenian Cinematheque and Slovenian Film Database (March-June 2025)
21 March / 1 April / 17 May / 3 June
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana and Slovenian Cinematheque
Curators: Vesna Bukovec, Robert Kuret
Nataša Prosenc Stearns is a video artist and a filmmaker who works with a wide range of moving image production and presentation, from scriptwriting, filming and editing to spatial installations, video objects and prints. The presentation of Nataša Prosenc Stearns’ film and video oeuvre, entitled Between Body and Space, is a selection of her work, which includes four programmes: Vortex, Process, Vertical Horizon and Black Waters. The first two programmes are still flirting with the fictional form. At the same time, the other two are already entirely experimental, with works of radically different aesthetics, genres and production contexts within a single strand, created in different periods from the late 1980s to the present day.
Co-production: SCCA-Ljubljana/DIVA Station and Slovenian Cinematheque
Partner: Slovenian Film Database (BSF)
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture
Thanks: Maja Manojlović, Rok Omahen, RTV Slovenia, Slovenian Film Archive, Slovenian Film Centre, Slovenian Film Database
