Artist in Focus: Daniel Jacoby
Artist on LI-MA's radar this summer!
At LI-MA, artists are at the heart of everything we do. Therefore, each season, we put the spotlight on an artist and their body of work. This summer, immerse yourself in the works and world of Amsterdam-based Peruvian visual artist and filmmaker Daniel Jacoby.
Since 2018, LI-MA has been proudly distributing the captivating video artworks of Daniel Jacoby, which deserve a place in our carefully curated media art collection. Renowned for their original themes, innovative approach, and striking visuals, we are especially excited to now also feature his latest piece, 315 (2023, 14 min). Daniel Jacoby interest in the human condition has led him to eccentric characters, places and stories, which he strives to approach from inventively tangential points of view.
New in the LI-MA Collection: 315
In Jacoby's latest work, a sequence of family anecdotes and historical events coinciding with the artist's date of birth takes on a different tone as he unearths what happened in his native Peru on that specific day in 1989. The monotonous pattern of facts pertaining to the 31st of May suddenly begins to unveil connections to notions of oppressive masculinity, the nuanced tactics employed by imperialist forces, and a neoliberal dream that facilitated the neglect of an important episode in Peruvian history.
Critical reception and screenings of 315
For Open City Documentary Festival 2024 in London, Sean Burns wrote: "315 angles at how the everyday patterns of our lives can be implicated in broader political issues and how inimical forces often lie beneath the surface of familiar constellations. What opens is a channel to think about gender, its construction, and its childhood conditioning."
Read the full article here
315 was screened internationally at:
- 10/2023 Ciaccia Levi, Paris FR
- 02/2024 MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York US
- 04/2024 Open City Documentary Film Festival, London UK
- 04/2024 GoShort, Nijmegen NL
Watch the trailer or click on the tile at the bottom of this page to view the work on mediakunst.net.
Other Daniel Jacoby works in the LI-MA collection
LI-MA distributes three other works from Daniel Jacoby's utterly unique oeuvre. Click on the tiles below to watch previews on mediakunst.net.
No one cried (2021, 23 min)
From plain white walls to bombastically crafted backdrops, adult chat rooms are portals to people’s phantasy worlds. Focusing on the moments when performers are off-screen, a meticulous concatenation of ghostly spaces takes us on an unsettling journey of self-expression and lonesome desire. The growing discomfort with what has happened or is about to happen in these empty rooms is interspersed with fragments of interviews with "camgirls" and "camboys" delving into the psychological repercussions of this digital type of sex work.
Tags: online culture, digital spaces, psychology
Nehemias (2019, 16 min)
This film is an atmospheric portrait of Christian, a young man from the city who finds himself an outsider in his new home, a poor village called Cocachimba in the jungle of Peru. Fragments from colourful Cubist paintings playfully interrupt the image while the camera shows nature in ever-flowing motion. Sitting on a rock, Christian philosophises about his newfound situation and recalls being visited by a mythical ‘devil’ in the dark of the night.
Tags: outsiders, nature, psychology
Mountain plain Mountain (2018, 21 min) w/ Yu Araki
Deepening confusion becomes a delightful experience watching this collaborative film by Daniel Jacoby and Araki Yu. The documentary observes the idiosyncratic sounds and rhythms of Ban’ei, a rare kind of draft horse race that takes place only in Obihiro, Japan. Capturing the behind-the-scenes operations of the race, the film gradually twists itself into a knot as the excited voices of the commentators merge into a frenzy of gibberish.
Award winner of the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition at IFFR 2018
Tags: nature, montage, animals
More about Daniel Jacoby
Daniel Jacoby's films have won awards at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Videoex, Filmadrid, Curtocircuito and Lima Independiente, and have been screened at MoMA Doc Fortnight, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Les Rencontres Internationales, e-flux Screening Room, EMAF, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Kasseler Dokfest, MIEFF, 25 FPS Zagreb and Jeonju IFF.
His work has also been part of exhibitions at EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), The Banff Centre(Alberta), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Delfina Foundation (London), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg) and Amsterdam Museum (Amsterdam).
Header image: video still from 315 by Daniel Jacoby | Thumbnail image: Daniel Jacoby
