Actors

Actors
Directed by: Stefanos Tsivopoulos
Duration: 36' \| Greece, 2004

Biography

Stefanos Tsivopoulos (b. 1973), is a Greek artist who lives and works in Amsterdam and Athens.
He recently completed a 2 years residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Recent shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, 1st Athens Biennial, Kassel Kunstverein Friedericianum, International Project Space Birmingham,1st Thessaloniki Biennial, the Deste Prize, Museum Het Domein, Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Montevideo Arts Institute Amsterdam, Center Photographique d_lle-de-France Paris, Sammlung Essl Vienna.
He is the winner of Golden Cube Award 2008, at the 25th Kassel film festival.
During 2009 he is an artist in residence at Platform Garanti in Istanbul.

Festival - Screenings

2005 Between Experience and Experiment, AD Gallery, Athens GR

Filmography

2008 Untitled (In Plato's Cave), video installation
2008 Reverse, video installation
2007 The Remake, film
2007 The Interview, video installation 2006 Land, film
2006 Play, video installation 2005 Three men, film 2005 True Fiction, video installation 2005 Occupation Unknown, documentary
2004 Actors, video installation 2004 Under Construction, documentary

Contact

Stefanos Tsivopoulos
Tommaso Albinoni 36
1083 HM, Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel: +31611107914
E-mail: stefanzabba@yahoo.com
AD Gallery
3 Pallados Street 105 54 Athens
Greece
Tel: +30 210 322 87 85
Fax: +30 210 322 87 85
E-mail: ad@otenet.gr

Composers


Director, Scenario, Montage:	Stefanos Tsivopoulos
Camera:	Aurelio Copainig
Casting:	Kemna Casting
Actors:	Jeroen Biegstraaten, Pepijn Cladder, Joa Hug, Franky Ribbens
Production:	Sandberg Institute Amsterdam

Summary

On 'Actors', 2004 Tsivopoulos places the actors in a suffocating enclosed military ward and asks them to improvise on the theme of military life.
He then records their improvisations, in fact their gradual identification with their new roles, which as if in a contemporary reproduction of Milgram’s experiment leads them to a borderline violent and suggestively homosexual fight for power.
The display of the artwork-—two levels of projection reproducing the television studio depth of view-—transforms the procedure of the identification of the actors with their roles into a mechanism of exposure of the viewer to the political conditions of his own identification with the heroes of the spectacle and objects of his/her own television-voyeurism. -Theophilos Tramboulis

The director about his film
Truth begins with an axiom of truth.
It begins with a decision.
Decision to say that an event has taken place.
Alain Badiou, The Political As A Truth Procedure In the centre of my artistic practice is the research, collection and analysis of archive photos, newsreels, film archives and other historically related imagery that constitute part of our collective memory.
These documents are taken out of their historical context and used in my work in a reverse mode instead of serving their purpose they are deployed to tell a new story.
By questioning the axiomatic value of a document, I'm at the same time stating that we are strongly appealed by the document as it is.
Trying to expose the aura of photographic document while revealing my own suspicion in its power to prove validity.
To show the paradox of the document and its inherent contradictions without using the witness, but rather the document itself as subject.
In the core of my work exists the following assumption that: It is the way a story is been told rather the story itself.
The origin of the story as a true or a not true event comes second to the image’s ability to create genuine emotions and overlook facts.
So archives are not necessarily serving as ‘representatives’ of the Historical truth rather are just another way to tell a story.
-Stefanos Tsivopoulos

Distribution