Parajanov, Troublemaker from the Caucasus
Jean Radvanyi

Talk

February 13, 2019 / 18.30

Geographer and film critic Jean Radvanyi is giving a talk as part of “Parajanov with Sarkis” exhibition, exploring Parajanov’s cinema in the Soviet context. Sergey Parajanov was born in 1924, in a family of Armenian merchants in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. His neighborhood was a multicultural bath typical of this city. The dominant languages were Russian and Georgian, mixed with Armenian and many other languages of the region. Very early, Russian dominated his education, due to his studies at the VGIK (the Moscow film Institute) and his long stay in Ukraine where he shot his first films and his first masterpiece, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (renamed Wild Horses of Fire) in 1965. Two founding elements characterize the films of this unique director. The first is its aesthetic, breaking with all the established frameworks of socialist realism. The second is more subtle, but equally unbearable because of the censorships of this country. Born into a multiethnic and multicultural environment, he never stopped questioning and provoking fierce discussions with each masterpiece.

Jean Radvanyi is a geographer and film-critic, professor at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. He specialised in geopolitical studies on Post-Soviet Space, specially Russia and the Caucasus.Among his publications, Le cinéma géorgien (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988), Le cinéma d'Asie centrale soviétique (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991), Le cinéma arménien  (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), La Nouvelle Russie (A. Colin, 2010) Atlas géopolitique du Caucase  (with N. Beruchashvili), (Autrement, 2010); La Russie entre peurs et défis (with M. Laruelle), (A. Colin, 2016). He also contributed to the exhibition catalogue “Parajanov with Sarkis” (Pera Museum, 2018).

The talk will be in French with simultaneous translation to Turkish.

Temporary Exhibition

Parajanov
with Sarkis

Pera Museum presented for the first time in Turkey a selection that brought together all periods of the versatile, multicultural visual world of renowned director Sergey Parajanov, master of poetic cinema.

Parajanov <br> with Sarkis

The Chronicle of Sarajevo

The Chronicle of Sarajevo

Inspired by the great European masters, from Renaissance to Art Nouveau, Berber’s works exemplify the deep, opaque whites of his journeys through the fairy tale landscapes of Bosnia to the dark, macabre burrows of Srebrenica.

Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel

Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel

In 1998 Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu collaborated on an obvious remake of Marcel Duchamp’s Roue de Bicyclette, his first “readymade” object. Duchamp combined a bicycle wheel, a fork and a stool to create a machine which served no purpose, subverting accepted norms of art. 

Dancing on Architecture

Dancing on Architecture

I think it was Frank Zappa – though others claim it was Laurie Anderson – who said in an interview that ‘writing on music is much like dancing on architecture’.