Ben Frost, Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten – The Murder of Halit Yozgat: An Opera under Quarantine

THE MURDER OF HALIT YOZGAT – AN OPERA UNDER QUARANTINE

Film by Ben Frost, Richard Mosse and Trevor TweetenIn the middle of the rehearsal process, work on the production of the opera The Murder of Halit Yozgat had to be suspended due to complications around COVID-19.

Now composer and director Ben Frost, together with Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten, are releasing a film about the project and the resumed rehearsals under Corona conditions. The result is a unique cinematic portrait on the borderline between documentation and fiction.

Over the last 10 years, Ben Frost has worked closely with the visual artist Richard Mosse and the cinematographer Trevor Tweeten. Together they have created numerous award-winning multi-channel videos and sound installations. Among others The Enclave, which was shown at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and Incoming (2017), which was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Their latest work, the art film The Murder of Halit Yozgat – An Opera under Quarantine, will be shown as a stream by the Staatstheater Hannover and co-production partner Holland Festival on Saturday 13 June and Monday 15 June, both at 8:30pm CEST / 7:30pm BST.

The stream will be available for 12 hours.Sat 13 June & Mon 15 June 2020, from 8:30pm CEST / 7:30pm BST on https://staatstheater-hannover.de/

ABOUT THE OPERAT

he Murder of Halit Yozgat was commissioned by the Staatsoper Hannover in co-production with the Schauspiel Hannover and Holland Festival and was due to be premiered on 17 April 2020. The Australian composer Ben Frost takes the NSU murder of 21-year-old Halit Yozgat in an internet café in Kassel on 6 April 2006, as an occasion for his opera. Based on the highly acclaimed installation 77sqm_9:26min by the research team Forensic Architecture, Ben Frost’s work is about our handling of and responsibility for history. He not only brought the opera and theatre ensemble together but also brought members of the Lower Saxony State Orchestra onto the stage and thus integrated them directly into the action.

Music Ben Frost Filmed and edited by Richard Mosse Photography Trevor Tweeten  Orchestrated by Petter Ekman Musical director Florian Groß Director Ben Frost Stage design Lisa Däßler, Mirella Weingarten Costume design Kerstin Krüger Sound design Carlos Boix Larrey Assistent to Ben Frost Olga Komarova Choreography Sasha Milavic Davies Dramaturgy Yvonne Gebauer, Friederike Schubert Executive producers for Ben Frost Nathalie Blue, Toby Donnelly With Sabrina Ceesay, Mathias Max Herrmann, Nicolas Matthews, Tahnee Niboro, Gudrun Pelker, Yannick Spanier, Hubert Zapiór

More information: https://staatstheater-hannover.de/de_DE/programm-schauspiel/der-mordfall-halit-yozgat.1224779

BIOGRAPHIES

BEN FROST

Ben Frost is a Composer, Producer, Sound Artist and Director. Born in Melbourne Australia in 1980 and based since the early 2000’s in Reykjavík Iceland, Frost was mentored by Brian Eno in the Rolex Arts Initiative. His work includes the studio albums Theory of Machines (2007), By The Throat (2009), A U R O R A (2014) and The Centre Cannot Hold (2017) and his work spans an array of other forms including installations, live performance, scores for dance, theatre and various studio collaborations. He has composed several scores for film including the Palme d’Or nominated Sleeping Beauty, the series Fortitude and Dark. Most recently he composed the score for Raised By Wolves with director Ridley Scott.

Frost’s directorial debut The Wasp Factory (2013), was performed to sold out audiences at London’s Royal Opera House. In 2020 he presents The Murder of Halit Yozgat – a new opera based on research agency Forensic Architecture’s counter-investigation of the neo-Nazi assassination for the Staatsoper Hannover. Frost also recently joined the touring lineup of the band Swans with whom he has previously collaborated in the studio.

RICHARD MOSSE

Richard Mosse was born in Ireland in 1980 and lives in New York. He is a photographer and filmmaker best known for his documentary journalism and contemporary art practice. His work captures the beauty and tragedy of war and destruction. Infra, his photographs of the war in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which he used colour-infrared films to create a new perspective on the conflict, attracted great attention. Mosse’s most recent work is a multi-channel immersive video installation entitled Incoming, for which he used a military camera that provides a view of over 30 kilometers and registers the heat signature of the temperature difference, creating a work of art about the refugee crisis that is taking place in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Libya, Syria, the Sahara, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere. It was first shown in 2017 at the Barbican Centre in London and is currently touring the world. Richard Mosse is the recipient of the prestigious Prix Pictet, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the Shifting Foundation, the Yale Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, the B3 Prize at the Frankfurt Biennale, a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and has received a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship.

TREVOR TWEETEN

Trevor Tweeten is a New York based artist and cameraman. He has a BA in film and video art and works at the interface between video, sculpture and installation. As a cameraman, he has made a number of feature films and video art projects ranging from narrative to documentary and experimental. His work is known for its strong visual language and lyrical visual style. His work includes Bounce: How the ball taught the world to play, which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in 2015, or the documentary Frank Serpico about police corruption in New York City. For his work, he has made numerous trips, including to the Middle East, South America, Africa and South Asia.

PHOTOS (links to high res below)

Film Stills(c) Richard Mosse