Nataša Prosenc Stearns (1966) is a filmmaker and video artist who works with a wide range of moving image production and presentation, from scriptwriting, filming and editing to spatial installations, video objects and prints. She became interested in video and film while attending the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, which, just in the late 1980s, introduced a course on video aesthetics. Soon after graduating, she expanded her video work into spatial installations, and the connection between video, film and gallery work is intertwined in much of her oeuvre.

In the early 1990s, Radio Television Slovenia was one of the key platforms for young artists. Nataša Prosenc Stearns worked for several years for the show Osmi dan (Eighth Day) and Kanal A and VPK, which gave her access to various equipment. In 1997, she received a Fulbright scholarship. She went to the California Institute of the Arts, where Miha Vipotnik also studied and one of her most important mentors, the conceptual filmmaker Nancy Buchanan, worked.

At the same time, the 1990s in the US were a time when foreigners, especially if they came from the countries of the former Yugoslavia, were expected to live with images of war, Balkan exoticism and the status of a refugee who could not return, to his own country. Nataša Prosenc Stearns's work resisted simplistic images of war, which she experienced primarily as an image conveyed by the media. Her work has never engaged in direct political engagement, which has led Holly Willis, Chair of the Media Arts Department at the California School of Cinematic Arts, to declare her an anomaly on the video art scene.

After completing her post-graduate studies, she worked with Emergent Properties in Los Angeles. Then, with her partners, she founded her own production company, Kanalya Pictures, where many of her works have been realized. She began working with American galleries and exhibited for a decade under the auspices of the Ruth Bachofner Gallery.

The exhibition of Nataša Prosenc Stearns' film and video oeuvre, entitled Between Body and Space, is a selection of her work, which includes four programmes: Vortex, Process, Vertical Horizon and Black Waters. The first two programmes are still flirting with the fictional form. At the same time, the other two are already entirely experimental, with works of radically different aesthetics, genres and production contexts within a single strand, created in different periods from the late 1980s to the present day. Her works are characterized by a focus on the body its materiality, which in later works becomes a spectral presence in the form of a silhouette filled with essential elements, with water, one of the central motifs of her oeuvre, predominating; the layering of images (multilayer), the various ways of assembling and combining them in montage programmes, the interconnection of everything living - or rather, material - into one sizeable pulsating organism marked by movement.
A moving image in Nataša Prosenc Stearns' work often means that as if a painting, petrified in time, suddenly swells, as if it breathes air for a moment - there is no story here, just a pulse. On the other hand, one can also recognize in her work themes that necessarily evoke the fact that life is being organized into human society: alienation, all-pervading consumerism, getting lost in virtual doubles, and the barely recognizable images of war and its victims.

With this programme, we want to continue the tradition of cooperation between SCCA-Ljubljana and the Slovenian Cinematheque, in which we present key authors in the field of video (so far, Miha Vipotnik, Ema Kugler, Marko A. Films that are otherwise available in the online archive Station DIVA (www.e-archive.org/diva/) are thus given a new life in a new context on the big screen. The cinema screenings will be complemented by a collaboration with the Slovenian Film Database (BSF), here it will be possible to see the remaining works by Nataša Prosenc Stearns.

--› Vrtinec
--› Proces