Runa Islam, ”Empty the pond to get the fish”, 2008
screening: 13 February (Saturday), 2010, 14h00

location: Cinema Muranów

In her 35-mm film installation Empty the pond to get the fish (2008), Runa Islam explores an abandoned modernist building by the Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer that was originally built for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels and later renovated to become the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna. In this non-mimetic cinematography the artist recalls the traditions of abstract and structuralist filmmaking, and attempts to subvert the traditional dependence of cinematography on narrative. The visual narrative emerges from the movement of the camera as it writes out the sentence ‘Empty the pond to get the fish’—based on the exact typographical image of this sentence in the English edition of Robert Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe.

Runa Islam - born 1970 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, lives in London