Another Eye
Another Eye: Benjamin Ramírez Pérez
Screening and talk with Ani Schulze
Thursday, April 4, 2024
7 PM
Benjamin Ramírez Pérez’s often-collaborative film and video practice interweaves diverse source materials: narrative sequences alternate with documentary elements, augmented by photographs, film clips, and overlayed text. In conjunction with the ninth Another Eye, Ramírez Pérez will present two works. These will be accompanied by a talk with artist Ani Schulze, in which he will give insights into his methods and current research.
The near-future science fiction story Sun Surface (2021, co-directed with Vincent Ceraudo) centers on a small team of scientists tasked with investigating previously unexplored transfers of energy and matter between the Sun’s surface and the Earth. From these differing narrative perspectives and in striking images showing shimmering stretches of desert and seemingly uninhabited urban expanses between Ordos (Inner Mongolia) and Shanghai, the short film interrogates the limits of growth, energy, and the economy while also posing questions about contemporary social, political, and ecological challenges related to issues such as the climate crisis or capitalism.
Like Sun Surface, the second of Ramírez Pérez’s works was preceded by a lengthy research phase whose theoretical and scientific discoveries were incorporated into the film: for Summer Heat An Early Frost (2020), he combines documentary scenes compiled during a residency program in Toronto. Evoking a sequence of associative images or thoughts, the film strings together archive sequences, photos, text passages on early twentieth-century film theory, interview excerpts, and clips from the US feature film An Early Frost (1985).
The talk with Ani Schulze will provide a new perspective on the creative process and highlight the research that went into these formally very different works.
Benjamin Ramírez Pérez (b. 1988, lives in Cologne) studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. From 2016 to 2018, he was a fellow at De Ateliers Amsterdam. His film and video works have been shown at the IFFR Rotterdam, Locarno Film Festival, TIFF Toronto, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Visions du Réel Nyon, the Julia Stoschek Collection and in solo exhibitions at the Artothek Cologne and Galerie Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf. In 2015, he received the Chargesheimer Prize for Media Art from the City of Cologne. He is currently working on the feature film Life Is About Losing Everything in collaboration with his brother, Stefan Ramírez Pérez.
Ani Schulze (b. 1982, lives in Cologne and Porto) studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and at Glasgow School of Arts. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at the Mountains Galerie in Berlin, the Lehmann + Silva Gallery in Porto, Kunstverein Siegen, and as part of the Double Feature program at Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt. In 2023, her monograph Hang in There, Baby was published by Mousse Publishing.
Another Eye is supported by The Gingko Foundation.
Image: Benjamin Ramírez Pérez and Vincent Ceraudo, Sun Surface, 2021, film still.