Martha Colburn - Wicked WorldThursday 16th January 2014, 21.00
In the nineties, Martha Colburn was part of the experimental Baltimore music scene, when she discovered celluloid for herself. Old 16mm educational movies she stained, scratched and destorted served as basis for her first experimental films. Soon she developed new techniques with marionettes and animations which she combined, with the help of her Super 8 camera, to more and more complex compositions. Over the past years, the use of paint on glass techniques was added to her wildly anarchic collage works.
In 2000, Martha Colburn was offered a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam where she worked on numerous film and music projects for five years before she moved to New York where she lives and works since then.
Her breathless films deal with the dreams and traumas of the Western World, her grotesque characters are tumbling through a chaotic universe of war, sex and violence, backed by propelling soundtracks. The subversive potential of her films is always a statement on current policies, e.g. on the 'War on Terror', and she counters a world gone off the rails with visual fireworks – excessive brutality and furious wit inclusive.
The programme:
Spiders in love: an arachnogasmic musical | Nederland | 1999 | 5 min.
Meet Me In Wichita | Nederland | 2006 | 7 min. 15 sec.
Waschdrang Mama | Nederland | 2006 | 2 min.
Destiny Manifesto | Nederland | 2006 | 8 min.
Myth labs | Nederland | 2008 | 7 min. 30 sec.
Triumph of the wild | Nederland | 2009 | 5 min. 10 sec.
Dolls vs dictators | Nederland | 2011 | 11 min. 15 sec.
