WEEK 1
8 – 14 April
Duration: 90 min, on loop

Nina E. Schönefeld
B.T.R
2020, 20 min 3 sec

AES+F
Inverso Mundus
2015, 35 min 36 sec

David Krippendorff
Kali
2017, 8 min 57 sec

Chto Delat?
Perestroika Songspiel.
A Victory Over the Coup
2008, 26 min 23 sec

Nina E. Schönefeld
B.T.R.
2020, 20 min 3 sec

B. T. R. (B O R N T O R U N) is about the world domination of right wing authoritarian autocracies and the complete prohibition of publication. It is also about the possible extradition of Julian Assange to the US and what this could mean worldwide for the situation of independent publishers, whistleblowers and journalists in the future. Schönefeld’s work examines the contemporary social and political climate by means of imagining a world where, due to drastic political shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival. A concept that perhaps is not so far fetched? B. T. R. is intended as a film of the future, but has its roots in the present. It is based on detailed research (e.g. on Julian Assange & Edward Snowden, on Cambridge Analytica, on investigative journalism and far rightwing movements).

AES+F
Inverso Mundus
2015, 35 min 36 sec

Engravings in the genre of "World Upside Down", known since the 16th century, depict such scenes as a pig gutting the butcher, a child punishing his teacher, a man carrying a donkey on his back, man and woman exchanging roles and dress, and a beggar in rags magnanimously bestowing alms on a rich man. These engravings contain demons, chimeras, fish flying through the sky and death itself, variously with a scythe or in the mask of a plague doctor. The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian "reverse, the opposite" and the Old Italian "poetry," and Mundus – the Latin "world," hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In AES+F’s interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.

David Krippendorff
Kali
2017, 8 min 57 sec

Kali is a short film inspired by Nina Simone’s rendition of Pirate Jenny, the song from the Brecht/Weil “Three Penny Opera“. The lyrics of the song have been rewritten to become a monologue, performed by actress Hiam Abbass in Arabic (with English subtitles). The film tackles issues of oppression, exploitation and injustice. The title refers to the Hindu goddess associated with Empowerment, Time and Change. Although presented as dark and violent, Kali is also a figure of annihilation of evil forces. It perfectly reflects the spirit of the text, an angry plea to vengeance over injustice and oppression.

Chto Delat?
Perestroika Songspiel. A Victory Over the Coup
2008, 26 min 23 sec

Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup is a video structured in the form of a song that conveys and analyses a key episode in the final period of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. In August of 1991 an unprecedented popular uprising against the established order took place. This uprising represented the end of the Soviet period and was deemed by the West to be the final triumph of democracy in Russia. The form of this film as a Songspiel also references Bertolt Brecht, using the term created by Brecht (“songspiel”) as a perversion of “singspiel” (German popular opera). The video speaks ironically about the epic genre that tinges certain historical processes, such as the one that meant the end of the Cold War and plays with a distanced re-writing of history. Shown in Points of Resistance in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche, the format of the songspiel invokes the tradition of choral church music, while furthermore addressing the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance during the GDR. With the proximity of the Zionskirche within meters to the former path of the Berlin Wall (on the East side!), and to the struggles of the many once trapped within it, Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup takes on a particular significance in light of Berlin’s divided past – a legacy that exists to this day in the ongoing tensions between East and West.

Shahar Marcus
Seeds
2012, 5 min 3 sec

The video Seeds explores the phenomenon of the buried mines that exist in Israel and the world over, exposing how these areas still carry the consequence of the war within their soil, while supporting the new populations who must inhabit the conflict areas. Seeds examines the power of the present moment in these places where efforts are beginning to shift these death zones into places that consciously affirm life, embracing continuity in the very place where it once was blocked.

Kate McMillan
The Lost Girl
2020, 7 min 13 sec

The Lost Girl is intended to be shown as an immersive film-based installation. The work is centered around the fictional character of a cave-dwelling girl on the east coast of England. Using DH Lawrence's book of the same name as a starting point, the film narrates the experiences of a young woman seemingly alone in a dystopian future, with only the debris washed up from the ocean to form meaning and language. It is set within a future-time which suggests the decimation of civilization as we now know it, bereft of other people. The character attempts to create a past and a future from the debris that is washed up from the ocean. She is without language and prior knowledge and must make sense of her existence only through detritus. The film combines McMillan’s various research interests including the Anthropocene, the role of creativity in forming memory, and the consequences of neglecting female histories. This work exists in the blurred space between history and imagination. Its setting, Botany Bay, is the namesake of the first site of contact between the British and the indigenous Gadigal people of the Eora Nation in what is now called Sydney. The choice of this landscape infuses the film with collective memories of colonial displacement and violence in Australia. The deserted spaces speak of the absence of their original populations. The survivors of such violence across the globe are now disproportionately affected by the impact of anthropogenic climate change, as the legacy of colonialism continues to determine survival or destruction.

Michael Wutz
Tales, Lies and Exaggerations
2011, 9 min 38 sec

The animation Tales, Lies and Exaggerations combines various drawn, photographed and filmed documents connected with other projects that Michael Wutz has been working on. The format was inspired by the ‘Cut-Up’ technique developed by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as well as by proto-Surrealist authors such as the Comte de Lautréamont. This work examines different aspects of dreams and dreaming: its language, mechanisms, symbols and utopian spaces, as well as its traumas.

Almagul Menlibayeva
Transoxania Dreams
2011, 23 min

Almagul Menlibayeva films mythological narratives staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. In Transoxania Dreams she leads her audience to the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation politics. The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road, with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxiana lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral Sea and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike comingling of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a dreamscape in a vacant landscape where the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female chimeras – a hybrid between the ancient Greek mythological figure of the Centaur and the animistic creatures of Central Asian folklore.

Nezaket Ekici & Shahar Marcus
TBQ
2017/18, Single-channel screening version
of a 3-channel immersive video installation:

1. Geniza, 2017, 8 min 42 sec
2. La Scala, 2017, 5 min 9 sec
3. Sea of Life, 2018, 10 min 56 sec

The trilogy TBQ (Tora, Bible, Quran) addresses how different cultures and religions deal with holy books. The overall question is: Can a holy book lose its holiness? All great religions relating to Abraham (Jewish, Christian and Islamic) adhere to the belief that a holy book will remain holy for all eternity. Thus, a holy book cannot and should not be discarded but rather requires special handling.

In the trilogy TBQ the artists show “performance-rituals“, using outdated holy books to revive their holy meaning and to free them from their unearned silence. The inner core of performance art is the ritual act itself, which shows similarities with the religious practice by means of repetition. In this light, the artists want to respect the specific ways religions developed in handling outdated holy books, striving to restore their divinity, by means of the ritualized performances they enact in Tel Aviv, Rome, and Istanbul.

Geniza, 2017, 8 min 42 sec

According to Jewish law, outdated and unreadable holy books have to be stored in a place, called “Geniza” (persian „ginzakh“ = "treasury"), which was usually a room attached to a synagogue or a hole in the ground to hide away unreadable holy books. Can a holy book loose it ́s holiness? All great religions relating to Abraham (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) give the same answer to this question: A holy book will be holy for eternity. Therefore holy books cannot easily be thrown away but need special treatment. Geniza was produced in a forest near Tel Aviv, Israel, and addresses the Jewish religion through the ancient custom of Geniza. The work deals with the ritual wherein books that were thrown in pirate caves under the pretext of Geniza undergo a process of restoration, so that at the end they are returned to their original purpose and their glory is restored, forming a shrine under the stars.

La Scala, 2017, 5 min 30 sec

La Scala was produced in Rome. The artists use elements of the Catholic religion in the video work: they walk on their knees on steps as pilgrims do at the Santa Scala in Rome in order to get closer to Jesus; they mount mirrors on their backs as done in ancient times to reflect the image of Maria into the sky; they use bibles on a red carpet and incense to bless outdated bibles. During the Middle Ages, the pilgrim, once arrived to the site of the holy relic, would take out of his robes a covered mirror. He would then uncover it to reflect the relic, then take it back to his home. When arriving to his land, he would reveal again the mirror, and reflect back the holy vision of the relic he believed was kept within it. The artists return to this ancient tradition and collect the holy books while reflecting their divinity to the sky as they progress on their knees towards the church of Santa La Scala.

Sea of Life, 2018, 10 min 54 sec

Istanbul was specifically chosen for three main reasons: the primary one lies in Turkey’s geographical location - the Bosphorus as a connection between East and West. From a historical and social standpoint Turkey was ruled by the Byzantine kingdom, one of Christianity’s strongholds, only to be later conquered and ruled by Islamic occupation, and to be reborn as modern-day Turkey under Ataturk, who separated state from religion. However, in recent years, Turkey is moving back towards Islamic influence. Marcus and Ekici preform one final act – they fill buckets with seawater, pouring them onto holy books they have ritually carried through the city. They then fill chalices with this ritual water and sail far out to sea, where they pour the water back into the sea, by which symbolically they pour the spirituality of the books into the sea.

Thomas Draschan
Continental Divide
2010, 9 min 44 sec

Thomas Draschan’s work speaks to us in a lexicon of found footage, cut-up DADA-style, and re-imagined into an absurdist analysis of our cultural fixations, reconfigured into the imagination of a better world. Drawing on a treasure trove of imagery from popular culture, with references to history and philosophy, Draschan imbues his deceptively quirky imagery with a complex depth of narrative, for those who wish to dive deep to see it.

“Continental Divide is an exploration of ritual as such. Unlike my other film work, it is extremely slow paced; a syncretistic meta-religious series of images in dreamlike transformation.”

– Thomas Draschan

Gülsün Karamustafa
Memory of a Square
2005, 7 min 7 sec

Gülsün Karamustafa’s Memory of a Square juxtaposes scenes of family life not linked to any place or time with a collage of 50 years of documentary footage of Istanbul’s famous Taksim Square. The documentary sequences trace the history of Taksim Square from 1930 to 1980. They allude to harrowing incidents such as the September 1955 pogrom, when organised mobs attacked the minority Greek community; the military coup of May 1960; ‘Bloody Sunday’ in February 1969, when protestors were attacked by right-wing thugs; and 1 May 1977, when hundreds were killed or injured after gunmen opened fire on the crowds celebrating May Day. This highly charged site has played a crucial role in political and cultural change throughout the history of the Turkish Republic and continues to does so long after this work was made. From the annual May Day protests to the infamous Gezi Park protests of 2013, Taksim Square is a physical space pivotal to the history of resistance in contemporary Turkey. In the context of this exhibition, the duality juxtaposing scenes of enclosed domesticity with the most iconic point of resistance in modern day Turkey, can’t help but bring to mind our current situation of recurring lockdowns in parallel to growing global unrest.

MAP Office
Runscape
2010, 24 min 18 sec

Created in 2010, a decade before the civil unrest in Hong Kong of 2019-20, Runscape takes on an added significance when viewed in light of the long-term anti-government protests which rocked Hong Kong in recent years. Runscape is a film that depicts two young men sprinting through the public spaces of Hong Kong, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists, to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze, to the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory, or at least trajectory, described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun”. A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space; positing the body in motion as an act of civil defiance. Runscape is used to knit together the geography of Hong Kong, a cartography that trades on the parallel ideas of mapping and civil disobedience by running through the streets. This is a creation of an artwork on the street, as it blurs the line between performance, happening, physical exercise, and rebellion.

“The City is growing Inside of us… A political act of defiance of the Urban Authority with its surveillance and restrictions on movement.” (Excerpt from Runscape)

Brad Downey
Melania
Part 1 & 2 (2019/20)

1. Melania, 2019, Sevenica Slovenia, 12 min 11 sec

2. Melania (media analysis), 2020, Sevenica Slovenia, 8 min 11 sec

Originally created by a Slovenian artist with a chainsaw from a tree trunk, the world's first sculpture of the American First Lady reflects both the anti-immigrant policies of the 45th U.S. President and the paradox of his own wife's immigrant background. The sculpture received worldwide media coverage. The first wooden version was set on fire by an unknown person on July 4, 2020, the American national holiday, and was subsequently replaced by Downey with a full-size bronze. The cause for the erection of the monument to Melania is Brad Downey’s first visit to Slovenia in the summer of 2018, when he discovered that it is the birthplace of the then First Lady of his homeland in the US. In light of the aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of her husband, Downey decided to commemorate this contradiction named Melania together with a team of Slovenian colleagues and the local community. After choosing and buying the poplar tree and after meeting and bringing Maxi – an amateur chainsaw sculptor, born in the same month of the same year and in the same maternity ward as Melania – into the project, the monument was unveiled in 2020 in Rožno, near Sevnica, on American Independence Day. These documentary films offer a portrait of Maxi, the folk sculptor, and his creation the Melania sculpture, together with the media storm of the aftermath. Exactly one year after the unveiling, on the 4th of July 2020, unknown perpetrators burned down the monument in Rožno. Brad then removed it and, joining forces with the local community that took care of the monument and its surroundings, erected a bronze replica. Melania is a multi-layered project that is simply not allowed to conclude by everything that is happening around it. 

Doug Fishbone
The Jewish Question
2019, 10 min

The Jewish Question looks at the various stereotypes and misconceptions about Jews and money over the years. It examines these questions through the prism of Doug Fishbone’s father's experience growing up in the Jewish community of the East End of London, as well as his family’s broader immigration history rooted in fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe. The film uses humor to debunk many of the more outlandish conspiracies that surround ideas of Jews and money, and the position of Jews in the world in general. The film was commissioned as part of Jews, Money, Myth, a major exhibition exploring the role of money in Jewish life, at the Jewish Museum in London in 2019. It has subsequently screened at the Kassel Festival in Germany and the UK Jewish Film Festival in London. Shown in Points of Resistance in Berlin’s historic Zionskirche, The Jewish Question is seen in the context of Berlin’s painful history, and particularly, the remarkable history of this church as a crucial point of resistance against the Nazis, led by renowned theologian and anti-Nazi activist Deitrich Bonhoeffer who worked in the parish for over a decade until his arrest by the Gestapo.

Thomas Draschan
Freude
2009, 2 min 5 sec

Thomas Draschan’s work speaks to us in a lexicon of found footage, cut-up DADA-style, and re-imagined into an absurdist analysis of our cultural fixations, reconfigured into the imagination of a better world. Drawing on a treasure trove of imagery from popular culture, with references to history and philosophy, Draschan imbues his deceptively quirky imagery with a complex depth of narrative, for those who wish to dive deep to see it.

“Freude is a film trying to mimic a visual orgasm. It’s trying to have sex with your retina.”

– Thomas Draschan