Nika Autor

The first time slot is intended for the presentation of three works. The film Here I Have a Picture (2022) was filmed in unofficial refugee camps created in the forests along the border with the European Union. The trees seem like pillars, supporting the fragile tent structures while offering shelter. The artist pays homage to the timelessness of nature in Red Forests (2022), which reveals its ideological connotations after only a few minutes when barbed wire appears in the untouched nature. This brutal barrier, preventing safe passage not only for migrants and locals in the area but for all living beings, is eventually overgrown by nature, softened, made almost invisible and thus rendered even more dangerous, even more lethal. The film tells the silent stories of the forests, sheds light on the unwritten narratives and bears an ominous feeling of countless individual experiences and pains. The first time slot is completed by Below the Hearts Get Bigger, Above Nothing Changes (2021), a compilation of film fragments featuring black-and-white shots of the faces of people from various camps. The work is dedicated to all those humiliated, lost, betrayed and invisible on the Balkan Route.

The second time slot shows two films focusing on railway lines and connections. The Train of Shadows (2017) examines railways, their historical significance and their social and political charge. Its starting point is a mobile phone shot taken from the wheels of the train on the Belgrade–Ljubljana line. Many of the former country's once-important transport arteries now serve as an unworthy mode of human travel, with many migrants trying to make their way to the Promised Land by riding in the undercarriages of the trains. In the second film, Sunny Railways (2023), the artist tells the story of the now-disused railway line between Šamac and Sarajevo. It is a line that was built with great optimism by volunteers from the youth work brigades but was damaged during the war in the 1990s and its fate was finally sealed by the Dayton Agreement and its partial privatisation when it was cut in half.

The overview of the artist's work is rounded off by the documentary Metka, Meki (2021). Here we enter the intimate story of the artist’s aunt Metka through a look at the preparation of everyday dishes in her home kitchen. The light-heartedness of her narrative, her views on broader social issues and her description of a seemingly simple life full of renunciation, pain and loss confront us with two stories. The first is the personal story of Metka, an economic migrant (Gastarbeiter) from "former" times, and the second is the story of a family from Afghanistan whom Metka has taken under her roof. The common thread running through all the protagonists of the film is a seemingly very simple wish – the wish for a better life, for which they are willing to forsake everything and everyone they know, become persecuted, excluded and forgotten.

15. 11. 2024—8. 12. 2024

Newsreel 2021 – Here I Have Picture
Newsreel 670 – Red Forests
Newsreel – Below the Hearts Get Bigger, Above Nothing Changes

10. 12. 2024 —5. 1. 2025

 Newsreel 63 – Train of Shadows
Newsreel 242 – Sunny Railways

7. 1. 2024—19. 1. 2025

Newsreel 80 – Metka, Meki