Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement. Since 2023 Eva van Tongeren joined the curating team of Courtisane.
https://www.courtisane.be/en
Culture, tradition and politics intertwine in practices that veer somewhere between activism, revenge and poetry. The films playfully rewrite and imaginatively refute systems steeped in violence, discrimination and sexism. The characters in these films overturn such structures by joining forces, sabotaging situations and imagining new narratives in humour-filled, queer, feminist fictions. The artists sugarcoat the bitter capitalist, colonised patriarchal histories with spectacular and funny scenes, sparks and fire.
With films by: Sarah Maldoror, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Mara Mattuschka, Mary Maggic.
Where do we come from? Where do we want to go? What is a good place to start from? What is a home? Celebrating the transformative potential of family and pedagogy, these films question what it means to grow up and what it means to belong. With careful analyses and personal reflections of intergenerational exchanges, filmmakers ask: where is your community and who decides what that looks like or how it evolves?
With films by: Josh Weissbach, Alanis Obomsawin, Beatrice Gibson, Lizza May David, Clara Sika Helbo, Alex Schuurbiers.
It drips, it splashes, it burns, it scrapes,
it shows, it sells, it melts
it laughs, it sighs, it groans
it scares, it cares, it wears, it breaks, it shapes,
it remembers, it repeats,
it learns,
unlearns,
relearns
A collection of films closely linked to feminist themes, dealing with the (female) body and its vulnerability. The artists talk about body politics, identity and emancipation. Often through performative videos, these makers reclaim space, question established norms, test boundaries and reckon with dominant gazes and oppressive power dynamics. In the films, sensuality, sexuality, pleasure and fun encounter violence, deprivation, oppression, discrimination and (hidden) forms of control.
With films by: Mariya Vasilyeva, Monika Treut, Ariane Loze, Veneta Androva, Lotte Louise de Jong, Claudia Lomoschitz, Cynthia Carballo Segovia, Ann Marie Flemming, Laure Prouvost, Natalia Papaeva, Panteha Abareshi, Elin Magnussen, Joan la Barbara.
2023 Selection 11 & 12
Scenes that are at once seductive and repulsive, tender and obscene, aesthetically thrilling and grotesque. Showing Family bubbles, the brutality of parenthood and sex dates, we never know if we want to intrude into the extreme intimacies or withdraw from the uncomfortable affections on the screen. A play between domestic and artistic labour, a play between the limitations of the artists’s psychophysical bodies and the mechanical bodies of their camera’s.
With films by: Tejal Shah, Jozef Robakowski, Josiane Pozi, Dani & Sheilah ReStack, André Colinet, Alex Schuurbiers, Jozef Robakowski, Jan Soldat, Siôn Marshall Waters.