A Point in the Making - Three Days with Babette Mangolte presents a programme around the work of French-American filmmaker and photographer Babette Mangolte in her presence. The Three Days look into various facets of her multidisciplinary practice, including her recordings of the early '70s New York avant garde art scene and her experimental films. The programme focuses in particular on her approach to documenting performance in her collaborations with other artists, and her pursuit of the subjective role of the camera eye in her autonomous practice. It is for the first time that such a broad spectrum of Mangolte's ground-breaking work in film and performance is shared with a Dutch audience.

The Three Days will start with a screening of Mangolte's film The Sky on Location at the EYE Filmmuseum and a Q&A with the filmmaker conducted by Bianca Stigter. A masterclass with the artist titled Framing the Performance, and a daylong programme of screenings and conversations with curators Fleur van Muiswinkel and Jacob Korczynski will take place the following days at Het Veem Theater.

Babette Mangolte occupies a position at the forefront of contemporary experimental filmmaking. Her films uniquely synthesize influences from French New Wave and the American structural film tradition with a feminist aesthetics. She approaches her subject matter from a distinctly subjective viewpoint that accentuates the processes of observing and being observed. Mangolte gained her reputation with a wide audience through her film registrations of performances of artists and choreographers like Marina Abramović and Trisha Brown, and in her role as cinematographer of the films of Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer. Located within this context of feminist practice, the work of Mangolte covers the fields of visual arts, theatre, dance and film, and her contribution to these fields includes her continuous interrogation of the (female) body before the camera and the subjective process of giving meaning in constructing the image in both making and viewing.

As part of If I Can't Dance's Performance in Residence programme, a conversation between curator Jacob Korczynski and Babette Mangolte will take place on Saturday 24 May at Het Veem Theater. Korczynski is curator in residence with If I Can't Dance and his ongoing research departs from an inquiry into the shared feminist aesthetics in Babette Mangolte's film The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977) and Lucy Lippard's novel I See/You Mean (1979). Lucy Lippard is a well known writer and feminist activist, whose experimental novel I See/You Mean was in development for nearly a decade until its publication in 1979. In the book she explores the relationships between a group of men and women through a collage of dialogue and appropriated texts, and most notably in written descriptions of photographs of the group. Korczynski appoints the narrative potential of image making to the work of several practitioners in film and visual arts whose practice developed a similar course during the 1970s. A key figure in his research is Babette Mangolte. Her film The Camera: Je or La Camera: I in particular engages with the image as text and the text(ure) of the image. The film's study of the performativity of portraiture and its narrative potential is enacted through the subjective camera eye as a point of focus that calls attention to the presence of the filmmaker and to the position of the viewers of the film.

For more information about Korczynski's research so far, see his research trajectory containing information on part events, documentation and logbook entries on his research.

Biographies
Babette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker living in New York City. In 1964 she became one of the first women to be accepted into the École Nationale de Photographie et de Cinématographie, but she soon found herself stifled by the Paris art scene of the seventies and moved to New York, where she has lived and worked since 1970. Extremely active in New York’s downtown scene, she has photographed performances by artists and dancers including Marina Abramović, Trisha Brown and Philip Glass. Mangolte worked as director of photography with Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer before she began making her own films (the first, in 1975). She has also worked with Richard Foreman, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Snow and Robert Whitman. Her experimental, non-narrative films have been screened in festivals around the world, and several retrospectives have been organised around her work.

Fleur van Muiswinkel is an independent curator and art historian based in Amsterdam. She organizes exhibitions nationally and internationally with young and established artists. Currently she is editor of the publication Color Logics for the Art Academy (KHU) in Utrecht. In June 2013 she curated the international group exhibition Abilities at Jeanine Hofland Gallery and was curator for ‘INexactly THIS’, the 2012 edition of the international art festival Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents. In 2011 van Muiswinkel completed her second masters degree in Curating at Goldsmiths University, London. Prior to that, van Muiswinkel worked at Office for Contemporary Art Norway as Coordinator for the International Studio Programme and worked at various Amsterdam cultural institutions including de Appel arts centre, SKOR, SMBA, and W139. In late 2013 van Muiswinkel curated the event Composing Through Words in collaboration with Het Veem Theater. Babette Mangolte and van Muiswinkel met in 2009.

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator based in Toronto. A recent participant in the de Appel Curatorial Programme, he has curated projects for the Stedelijk Museum, South Asian Visual Arts Centre, Oakville Galleries, and was a contributor to Matthew Lutz-Kinoy's Loose Bodies at Elaine MGK. His writing has appeared in Prefix Photo, C Magazine, Fillip, and The Power Plant publication Jimmy Robert: Draw the Line (in collaboration with Oliver Husain). Currently, he is a researcher for the Performance in Residence programme of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution.

A Point in the Making - Three Days with Babette Mangolte is produced and curated by Fleur van Muiswinkel, If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution and Het Veem Theater, in a collaboration with EYE Film Institute. The project is supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) and Fonds Podiumkunsten (FPK). It is part of the Life Long Burning (LLB) project and supported by the Cultural Programme of the European Union.