Kunstverein München

Otarkino

13 - 15 May 2016

OTARKINO
13 - 15 May 2016

Give your ears, mouth, nose, and fingers a seat at a table usually reserved for the eyes. On 13, 14, and 15 May 2016, Antwerp-based food and film collective Otarkino* will present three ‘film dinners’ — transforming Kunstverein München into a synesthetic wormhole where Time is Thyme, where films taste good, where cups are filled with sound, where narratives bounce from the plate to the screen to the plate.

Three menus, five films, over three evenings. Each night, Otarkino will project different movies onto a five-meter wall, while corresponding menus are served at tables for two. These menus sprang from images, words, or feelings in films by directors Sergei Parajanov (Friday), Hiroshi Teshigahara, Sharon Lockhart, and Shûji Terayama (Saturday), and Jonas Mekas (Sunday), but the menus consist of more than food and drinks. A well-timed taste or texture, an evocative occurrence, a dangling fragrance — all of it, choreographed to arrive on cue.


PROGRAM

Film Dinner 1:
Friday 13 May 2016, 7pm

FILM:

Sergei Parajanov,
The Colour of Pomegranates (1968)

Idiosyncratic director Sergei Parajanov eschews conventional narration to reveal chapters from the life and work of the celebrated Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (King of Song), producing visually stunning and dreamlike tableaus inspired from Armenian illuminated miniatures and religious rituals.

MENU:

Water and Wine
The Color of Pomegranates
Georgian Bread
Naturally dyed, hand spun Pasta
Pismanye
A Pomegranate Pink Pepper Sorbet
Armenian Armagnac


Film Dinner 2:
Saturday 14 2016, 7pm

NO — A Japanese Dinner

FILM:

Hiroshi Teshigahara,
Ikebana (1956)
One of the most acclaimed Japanese avant-garde directors, Hiroshi Teshigahara follows the history of Ikebana — the Japanese art of flower arrangement — into the present by depicting his father, Sofu Teshigahara, the founder and master of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, as he prepares for an annual solo exhibition of his work.

Sharon Lockhart,
NŌ (2003)
By filming a Japanese farming couple working the land, from a fixed camera angle, the American artist and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart produces a minimal yet dynamic landscape painting that connects the traditions of photography and cinematography to sculptural earthworks and a radical form of Ikebana.

Shûji Terayama,
Shadow Film – A Woman with Two Heads (1977)
A modern family’s shadows separate from their sources and begin to lead a completely different life in the renowned avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama’s sepia-toned experimental short film.

MENU:

IKEBANA
The next Flower
Common Vegetables
and Lotus Root Chips

NO
A landscape painting in autumn rice or
NŌ- no Ikebana

A WOMAN WITH TWO FACES
A ghost of a Dessert and
a Drink

Film Dinner 3:
Sunday, 15 May 2016, 7pm

FILM:

Jonas Mekas,
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972)

In a highly personal narrative that accentuates the displacement of memory and place, celebrated director Jonas Mekas documents his and his brother’s return to their native Lithuanian village of Semeniškiai, after almost three decades in exile.

MENU:

The picnic of the immigrants

Never

I remember you

Of a birch tree

So he started eating leafs

Always the berries

Oh cool water of Seminiskiai

You can’t find your spoons when you’re old

Don’t tell there in America that we sleep in hay

Mama bakes Potato Pancakes

The House of Wittgenstein

The fruit market was on fire
*
Based in Antwerp, Otarkino consists of film curator Vincent Stroep and food collective Otark Productions (Hadas Cna’ani and Charlotte Koopman). Since 2012, when Otarkino paired Les Blank’s 1980 film Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers with grilled cheese and kimchi sandwiches, ‘zodiac vegetables’, soup and other garlic-infused snacks, Otarkino has continued to collide food and film in ’...a sensuous conversation between smell, texture, light, temperature, image, sound, and taste. A carrot, stretching its long green legs, hand-pressed crackers with herbs, plum brandy from the Eastern European bodega around the corner. Some movies will grow flowers on your table. Others will bring stones or voodoo objects made with exotic seeds and elastic braided cheese.’

Additionally, Kunstverein München and Roma Publications will release a new publication — the fifth in the Companion series — compiling the films, menus, and serving timelines generated through the 25 events Otarkino has produced to date.
 

Tags: Sharon Lockhart, Jonas Mekas, Otarkino