Yafit Taranto

During the past two years, I followed the master Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy. My artistic research ‘Fun Fatale’ revolves around modes of female emancipation from the patriarchal order. The possibility of liberation that exists in every situation by a change of perspective, small actions or grand decisions. Fun Fatales operate within society, bending the existing structures to claim their freedom.

The same strategy is used in the project Through the Eye of the Needle. A group of women is brought together in performance around sewing machines. At first glance, it may appear to be a sweatshop in which women are bound by classic roles and professions, but behind their machines their separate voices, sounds and materials become an orchestra of a united movement. The traditional cinematic experience is challenged and bent as images, stories, perspectives and sounds are woven together and projected. Set as a performance in a non-cinematic location, actors, makers and spectators are invited to meet and interact to create the outcome together.

Short film is my favorite medium to tell stories, rhyme my thoughts and reach the world.

This is a short film of some of the short films I made. The NPO shorts and Reconstructing Stevens I made in collaboration with Yael Assaf.
The film ‘Isle of the Dead’ was made in association with Ibrahim Attallihi.

A film installation in the new design of the Vincent van Gogh museum.

Werelwijde inspiratie Vincent van Gogh is een cultureel icoon én een visueel cliché. Zijn schilderijen behoren tot de meest gereproduceerde kunstwerken ter wereld en worden in alle lagen van onze visuele cultuur gebruikt. Van Gogh heeft een grote impact gehad op vele moderne en hedendaagse kunstenaars, en inspireert tot op de dag van vandaag. De mythen rondom zijn levensloop en ziekte hebben Van Goghs iconische status gestimuleerd en vergroot; hij is uitgegroeid tot een wereldster. Mensen gaan met zijn kunstwerken op de foto zoals ze een popidool of filmster vastleggen. Deze wereldwijde faam heeft er voor gezorgd dat er duizenden bezoekers per dag Van Goghs kunstwerken in het echt willen komen bekijken en dat wereld wij mensen, geinspireerd door zijn kunst en leven, nieuwe kunstwerken, culinaire kunst, mode, filmpjes, en dit alles delen via social media.

(Text by Van Gogh museum curator Maite van Dijk)

May 2013, ‘Dreams of Nature’ , Van Gogh museum.

Freud had a reproduction of the painting in his clinic, Lenin hanged a print of it in his office. Hitler even bought the third original version of the Isle of dead and placed it in the new Reich Chancellery in 1940. Reproductions of the painting , post cards and caricatures’ were sold by the thousands. According to Vladimir Nabokov copies of Isle of dead were to be found in every Berlin home in the beginning of the twenties century. From world leaders, intellectuals and famous artist to middle class German housewives people seem to love the painting “The Isle of Dead”.

In this film Ibrahim Itallie and myself were trying to trace the nature of the spell that this painting cast on it’s viewers? What was the secret of the painting?

And has this appeal faded today? Does the painting still inspire audiences in the same way it did then and why?  Watch the film to find out.

Only one hundred years ago a single C.U of a gunshot could cause panic and chase an entire film audience from the cinema. Nowadays overload of moving images are everywhere.  We became such an experienced viewers its seem as if a ten years old child can classify images at the speed of sound.

In the film that I make for museums I try to create a bridge between art that was often made hundred years ago and give ‘a key’ showing how those master pieces are above time and still valid after all these years and changes.

In my work as a VJ I have the absolute freedom to play during a whole evening. The preparation work also allows me a great deal of autonomy: I combine between mediums, I cut films frame by frame and draw over them, I fill up cut out windows with my forgotten dreams, or write short stories and look for new ways narrating them in this non chronicle medium (of VJing).