Rose Butler’s ‘Line of Resistance’ screening at the Filmwinter Stuttgart Festival for Expanded Media this month

Rose Butler‘s Lines of Resistance will be screened at the 32 Filmwinter Stuttgarter Festival for Expanded Media on Saturday 19 January 2019 in Stuttgart, Germany.

Lines of Resistance will form part of the screening curated by A BROKEN LINK, a survey of contemporary practice in artist film and video. The themes explored include ideas of temporal and geographical displacement, of how digital technologies bring people and ideas together but also reinforce the essence of distance and alienation.

Rose Butler’s Lines of Resistance 
Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Theater tri-bühne Stuttgart
Saturday 19 January 2019
A detailed programme for Filmwinter Stuttgarter can be found here.

Rose Butler is interested in political narratives that surround and shape us, making works that weave political, spatial and fictional histories. Lines of Resistance (6m 22s, 2012) is filmed at the Berlin Wall Memorial, a preserved and sealed section of the former wall and death strip which divided East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The memorial remains to memorialise those who died trying to get from the Eastern sector to the Western sector and provides a history of the wall and its consequences.

The film, informed by the narration of tour guides and visitors comments, explores their interaction with and reactions to the memorial and considers the space as a site of control. The wall presents a brutal and barren environment illustrating a bleak history, which is disrupted by the arrival of colourful, enthusiastic and intrigued tourists. This disjuncture and sometimes humorous and clumsy encounter forces us to question how we navigate, consume and reflect upon these sites of human tragedy.

Rose Butler is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, she works with video, photography, sound, animation and installation. She is a Doctoral Researcher registered in C3RI and sponsored by the SHU Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship Scheme. She is also a board member of Bloc Projects and a freelance artist mentor. Find out more about Rose’s work here.