Summer – Fall 2018 Artist-in-Residence
Emma Rozanski
June – October 2018
Artist Bio: Emma Rozanski is an Australian filmmaker, multi-media artist and a first-generation MFA graduate of Bela Tarr’s acclaimed film.factory experiment in Sarajevo. Her debut feature-length film, PAPAGAJKA (The Parrot) had its World Premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in 2016 and continued on to a successful festival run worldwide. Emma’s moving image works have collectively have been selected for over 150 festivals and exhibitions worldwide and won several awards. She is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talents, the Berlinale Short Film Station and the Reykjavík Talent Lab. Emma is part of the artist collective, Bistrik7 (@Bistrik7), a group of 20 filmmaker-artists from around the globe who make collective projects and curate screenings and exhibitions of their work. Currently, Emma is developing her next two narrative feature films, along with an ambitious long-form video art piece.
Artist Statement: As a filmmaker, multimedia and installation artist, Emma creates work that defies genre expectations and is often considered experimental by conventional narrative standards. Her art work combines different materials, techniques and performance practices for altered perspectives on texture and form utilization. Playful undertones of lateral thinking reveal a love for absurdism that also challenges traditional methods and platforms for moving image. Emma’s narrative film work tends towards character-based stories, with avant-garde structures based in cinema traditions, often using magic-realist elements. Fascinated by moral ambiguity and heightened-realism, her practice usually delves into these realms – creating worlds that symbolically externalize the inner-psychology of her characters. With a background in theatre, Emma’s practice also plays with performing arts processes, to form stories that manifest organically through a ‘channelling’ process of character investigation and moving image creation.
Rozanski’s work will be featured in Specimens of Chance and Play – Artist in Residence Capstone Exhibition the International Museum of Surgical Science from November 2, 2018 – December 2, 2018.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
