Elle Flanders
Visit Palestine: Change Your View – Socially engaged art in Israel/Palestine
FEBRUARY 19, 2015
Elle Flanders is a filmmaker and artist based in Toronto. She was raised in Montreal and Jerusalem and holds both an MA in Critical Theory and an MFA from Rutgers University. She holds a PhD in Visual Arts and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program where she mentored with Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler. Flanders’ work has been screened and exhibited internationally including: the Museum of Modern Art; Berlin International Film Festival; The Toronto International Film Festival, the MOCCA and the Incheon Biennial. Her collective art practice is Public Studio with architect Tamira Sawatzky. Their practice employs a diverse range of media resulting in large-scale public art works, films, immersive installations, lens-based works and socially engaged projects. Public Studio explores the intersection of art and architecture, urbanization and industrialization with a particular focus on landscape and the effects of war in the everyday.
Her most recent work includes: The Dialogues, a series of films displayed in public spaces — subways and advertising LED billboards — addressing revolution through the extraction of dialogue from the history of cinema Drone Wedding, an eight-channel film installation examining surveillance in the everyday, What Isn’t There, a 15-year ongoing photo installation project that documents Palestinian villages that no longer exist; Road Movie, a six screen installation on the segregated roads of Palestine that premiered at TIFF (2011) and the Berlinale (2012); and Kino Pravda 3G, a series of video installations addressing current public dissent and protests across the globe. Flanders also made the award-winning documentary feature Zero Degrees of Separation about Israel, Palestine and the queer international. She and her partner Tamira Sawatzky, are working on a new feature film: HarMageddon and several large-scale public art installations addressing public space and deterritorialization.
