Documentary Films: Exploring Graffiti, Street Art & Urban Art

On march the fifth, Banksy will be with you! As BBC wrote today, a brilliant street art film will come to the cinemas in Great Britain. It’s a film about a world without rules, where one man broke them all. It’s a Banksy film! It’s called Exit Through The Gift Shop. The film is billed as the world’s first street art disaster movie. For this reason, it looks like a film of a man who wanted to film Banksy but failed. Nevertheless there are a lot of famous urban artists, like Shepard Fairey, in the movie. I’m very curious to see the film. Here is a excerpt of the BBC’s article: ...

Today, I got a nice e-mail from Claire from the online video platform Babelgum. She wrote about the online premier of the great urban art movie “Inside Outside” by Andreas Johnsen and Nis Boye Møller Rasmussen from Denmark. “Inside Outside follows artists from New York, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Sao Paulo who blur the lines between legal and illegal art, making a living through engaging with the commercial art world, but still thriving on the energy of working in the street. ...

For me there’s almost nothing more interesting than an abandoned industry area, old and uninhabited houses or those lonely and lonesome places between houses in the urban landscape. Six days ago, I already posted an article about a fantastic abandoned painting project, called Ghostvillage, which took place on the west coast of Scotland several weeks ago. Now there’s another video, documenting the work of the six renowned urban artists Timid, Remi/Rough, System, Stormie Mills, Juice 126 and Derm in that old ghostvillage. ...

Until Yesterday, I didn’t know that there’s an very interesting street art book about one of my favorite urban artists Swoon on the market. Swoon is known by most people through her wheat-pasted cut-outs, which have appeared throughout New York for the better part of the last decade. Her unique style and her claim to document urban life and culture in an artistic way, made her artworks popular around the world. ...

As you may already know, I love urbanity! I love it to see and discover different city around the world. I love it to explore cities in different seasons. For me, there’s almost nothing better than to get new and nice impressions - maybe from an other point of view - of urban scenes. Yes, you could say that I know my hometown Berlin, but I never saw nicer images of snow in Berlin. ...

If your aren’t Scottish, you have maybe never heard about the great and fantastic “Ghostvillage Project”. Some weeks ago, six more or less renowned urban artists - Timid, Remi/Rough, System, Stormie Mills, Juice 126 and Derm - meet each other for three days on the west coast of Scotland to repaint an abandoned 1970s village. Working together on huge collaborative walls and individually in hidden nooks and crannies all over the site the artists realised long held dreams and were inspired by the bleakness and remoteness of the site. Drawing on the history of the village the artists’ stated intent on completion of the project was to populate the ghostvillage with the art and characters that it deserved. (Agents of Change) ...

Yeah, do you know, that there will be a new documentary movie about women in the graffiti world? No? I will tell you some facts about it: “Girl Power” is the name of that new graffiti film, which shows impressions and emotions from around the world. The film crew traveled with 20 graffiti girls to over ten cities, like Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Budapest, Moscow, and so on. For some weeks, the first teaser for the documentary movie, which will be released in 2011, is online! It presents some parts of the Berlin trip. ...

I love it to listen to the various sounds, songs and voices of the often talented musicians in the subway-stations or trains. In my opinion they are part of the urban culture as well as the subway graffities or the tags on the ticket automates! Mike Kobal recently published his first subway music sample video, which shows really talented people from New York! When I watched it the first time, I got very impressed and a bit jealous, because here in Berlin, I often see people playing a didgeridoo or a accordion, but I can’t remember ever having seen an entire band or a saxophonist… ...

In August, I invited you to the urban art fair “Stroke.01”, which took place in Munich between October 29th and 31st. About 30 galleries presented a lot of great urban artists, like L’Atlas, Emess, Flying Fortress, Mizzo, Cope 2, Swoon, Pisa73, Klub7 and others and about 7,000 visitors and guests came to see their amazing, graffiti and street art inspired artworks! ...

Urban Abstract is a very interesting journey across urban space. It’s an video artwork, which shows urban impressions in an very abstract way. “Born in Tokyo during 2009 this piece was created by the art director Jopsu Ramu from Musuta Ltd. (a multidisciplinary design agency based in Helsinki & Tokyo) and Shun Kawakami (Artless Inc) an artist and designer from Tokyo.” (creativesideblog.com) ...