
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
* 1973 in Montréal.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born artist, diarist and aspiring bon-vivant. Since 2000 his work has brought together song, self-reflexive performance and song lyrics as vehicles for examining the singing voice, the untranslatability of emotions into language and the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture. Nemerofsky Ramsay's video work has screened in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at the Hamburg Short Film Festival, the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm- und Videofest and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (all in Germany), the Avanca Festival (Portugal), the Toronto Inside Out Film and Video Festival (Canada) as well as First Prize at the Globalica Media Arts Biennale (Poland). His work is part of numerous private collections and the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He currently divides himself between Canada and Europe.
Personal website: http://www.nemerofsky.ca/
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1425630/
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay followed the invitation by VIS Vienna Independent Shorts to be Artist-in-Residence at the quartier21 of the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna from May 1st to June 30th, 2010.
FILMS directed by BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY
Sadame Gawa

2008, 4 min
Commissioned by the Reel Asian Film Festival, a short video to accompany the karaoke version of the 1975 Enka ballad Sadame Gawa. The video premiered as part of the festival's Empty Orchestra Project, which paired video artists with members of the karaoke club from Toronto’s Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, and was performed live by Stan Kayama.
The Same Problem

2008, 4 min
Everytime he woke up, it was the same problem. He got no peace. He couldn't walk away from it. - Collaboration with Aleesa Cohene.
Präsentiert von VIS im Rahmen von:
VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2010, No Ordinary Love
OmU (Original mit Untertiteln)

2007, Video Design for Theatre
Video design for various stage elements of OmU, a dance theatre production choreographed by Berlin-based Laurie Young. Design included video for multiple screens on stage. OmU explores the impossibility of translation as a viable method for understanding languages and bodies. OmU was co-produced by the Uzès Danse Festival (France) and Sasha Waltz and Guests (Berlin) and premiered at Radial System V in June 2007.
Uropop

2006, 2 min
The pause that refreshes. Produced as part of the Homage à Jean Genet commissioning project of le Festival des Films Gais + Lesbiennes de Paris.
One to Sixty-Five

2005, 4 min
Short dance video produced as the result of choreographic research towards the production of OmU, a dance piece by Laurie Young. Performers Lena Meierkord, William Wheeler and Laurie Young sample and remix iconic gestures from various 20th century dance styles in a virtuosic dance sequence performed in a Berlin shopping mall parking lot.
Patriotic

2005, 4 min
The language of anti-terrorism takes an unexpected form in this seductive propaganda video, Pascal Lièvre and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay's first collaborative work.
Presented by VIS within the context of:
KurzFilmZimmer März 2009
VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2010, No Ordinary Love
Other presentations (selection):
Festival Némo, Paris, 2006 (premiere)
Awards:
2006 Video Prize, Festival Avanca, Portugal
Subtitled

2004, 2 min
I just can’t get you out of my head, boy your love is all I think about.
Together at Last

2004, 6 min
We are not far from mutation, nor will we ever be allowed to forget our origins. As the egg divides, so does the species. Together at Last marks the frail boundaries between the what-is and the what-might-be. Commissioned by the 640480 Collective. - With Cooper Battersby.
Tonight
2004, 3 min
An excerpt from Nemerofsky Ramsay’s 2-hour video installation Lyric, in which the artist performs a sung narrative comprised of sound bites collected from lyrics of one thousand love songs. Forever’s going to start tonight!
Presented by VIS within the context of:
VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2010, No Ordinary Love
Audition Tape

2003, 8 min
Gay white male, 5’11”, 155 lbs, 29 years old, good singing voice and co-ordination, desperately seeks job as performer in the Russian girl pop group, TATU. History, sexuality and identity collide in a musical monologue inspired by outtakes from American idol competitions.
Presented by VIS within the context of:
VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2010, No Ordinary Love
Other presentations (selection):
Milwaukee LGBT Film and Video Festival 2003
Awards:
Colin Campbell Memorial Award, Inside Out Festival 2003
LYRIC

2004, 110 min, 5 DVD installation
LYRIC features the performance of a sung narrative comprised of sound bites collected from lyrics of one thousand love songs. Familiar lyrics were isolated, sampled and arranged into a series of hybrid theme-based songs, then sung as a classical song cycle in an epic solo performance. The focus is on commonly heard lyrics, lines that reproduce banal, hegemonic concepts of love and relationships, “I will love you forever” and “I would die without you”. The video engages on a musicological level while also revealing a sense of human endurance, a physicality that reflects exhaustion from the act of marathon singing, the act of consuming mass quantities of pop music and the act of loving. LYRIC is designed for looped installation divided among five monitors, and its unconventional narrative structure allows viewers to join or leave the story at any time. LYRIC is accompanied by LIBRETTO, an editioned artist book providing the complete song texts from LYRIC.
I Am a Boyband

2002, 5 min
A cloned boyband co-opts an Elizabethan madrigal to express its heartbreak over lost love and examine representations of masculinity in contemporary pop music.
Presented by VIS within the context of:
KurzFilmZimmer Juli 2009
VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2010, No Ordinary Love
Other presentations (selection):
Images Festival of Independent Film and Video 2003
Toronto InsideOut Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival 2003
Worldwide Short Film Festival 2003
Hamburg Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 2003
MIX NYC: Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film and Video Festival 2003
Los Angeles Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 2004
Prague Short Film Festival 2005
Sydney Canadian Film Festival 2006
Awards:
First Prize, WRO Media Arts Biennale 2003
Festival Prize, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 2003
Live to Tell

2002, 5 min
A ubiquity of surveillance cameras becomes the audience for a choral rendition of a 1980s Madonna ballad.
Presented by VIS within the context of:
VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2010, No Ordinary Love
Other presentations (selection):
Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival 2003
Worldwide Short Film Festival 2004
La Rochelle International Film Festival 2004
Rochester ImageOut Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival 2004
Awards:
Experimental Prize, Hamburg Short Film Festival 2003
Kassel Videofestival Stipendium Prize 2003
Forever Young

2001, 5 min
An information overload of simultaneous translations, satellite weather reports and defragmenting computer screens, Forever Young is part love poem and part lament to our visions of the future. Do you really want to live forever?
Je changerais d'avis

2000, 4 min
How do you say 'I love you' in the information age? A desperate love song is filtered through simultaneous translations, web cameras and weather reports.
Presented by VIS within the context of:
VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2010, No Ordinary Love
Awards:
Wand-5 Prize, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, 2002
White

1998, 4 min
An original Yiddish poem uses the colour white to retrace memories of lost clothes, lost bodies and a lost identity.
