Lawrence Lek – EUROPA, MON AMOUR (2016 BREXIT EDITION)

UK 2016, 14’, English OV

With the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston has degenerated into a post-apocalyptic utopia. Come and explore this drowned world of the near future: filled with forgotten nightclubs, neon-lit music venues, voting booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. This site-specific  simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As players roam around, a voiceover extracted from Alain Resnais’  HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR speaks to them about the nature of memory. It is a gradual, but relentless sense of forgetting that comes with any form of urban transformation.

“Brexit would be a step back to the 19th century, to a world where the UK saw itself as the global superpower. Except now it would be a delusion. EUROPA, MON AMOUR is a virtual fantasy world based on this very real, but troubling, scenario. Dalston, acting as a proxy for the whole of the country, is buried under mountains of sand, luxury apartments lie in ruins, and only cultural landmarks like the Rio cinema and Efes snooker club are reminders of the vibrant life of the pre-Brexit UK.” (Lawrence Lek)

Mario Pfeifer – #BLACKTIVIST

USA 2015, feat. Flatbush ZOMBiES, 2-channel, 5’, English OV

For the 2-channel work #BLACKTIVIST, Mario Pfeifer encouraged the rap collective Flatbush ZOMBiES to write a song about the current situation of Afro-American communities in the US and articulate their view on racism, police violence and the virtually unrestricted access to arms. They shot a music clip together, which on the one hand consists of found footage material – for example dashcam and bodycam pictures of encounters with the police saturated with violence –, on the other hand of staged elements. The clip is flanked by pictures of the first 3D printing arms factory, which is run in Texas as a nonprofit organization and makes the blueprints of fabricates public and freely accessible to anyone. Concerning the open access publication and with the associated subversion of registered gun possession, the arms workshop Defense Distributedrefers to the law of free expression being enshrined in the constitution and the second amendment which guarantees the right of possessing firearms. Moreover, interview extracts made by Pfeifer and the rappers Erick Arc Elliott, Meechy Darko and Zombie Juice, talking about pacifism and the idea of working collectively, correct and broaden the work.

Harald Hund – EMPIRE OF EVIL

AT 2016, feat. Stephen Mathewson, 11’, English OV

Based on media representations of Iran, Harald Hund poses the controversial question of trust in image documents which suggest authenticity and thus present a prospect of truth. At that, the title – referring to Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s dichotomous terms of ‘Evil Empire’ and ‘Axis of Evil’ – already associates that, initially, Iran appears as a cultural area the political conflict situation of which serves as a projection surface for foreign, ‘western’ attributions.

“As early as in the initial sequences, the web of documentary evidence and fiction, of pictorial testimony and oral report is construed – a web along which EMPIRE OF EVIL turns out to be a critical narrative: images of the airplane’s interior, the view from above on a rugged, cloud-covered landscape, the information screen. As well, it is talked about ‘secret recordings’ and ‘atomic weapons program’, and without naming names it is obvious which country it is about, which one it has to be about. Hund consistently interlocks documentary codes and investigative signatures with elements on the level of the spoken word, of a voice over (with US accent) that increases into the absurd more and more, and with elements that give rise to doubts about the images and their information content evermore.” (Irene Müller)

Warren Neidich – THE SEARCH DRIVE

2015, 17’, English OV

The video takes the perspective of an anonymous internet-user making contingent decisions based upon speculative linkages of information on the web, asserting that the internet itself contains an inner subjectivity that can be interrogated. In THE SEARCH DRIVE, “software programs utilized by the NSA to spy on Americans and foreign nationals, residing in America and abroad, are used by an autonomous agent to search through the web for personal and classified information about myself. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Instagram are hacked and ransacked. As such it traces over time an autobiographical sketch of my comings and goings, activities and friendships. I am calling this a Hack-ography. […] That I am a radical artist with anarchistic tendencies who has worked in Egypt with many Islamic musicians, as well as Franco Berardi, the political activist, and have wired [my assistant] Ashiq money, creates a narrative of implied guilt by association to popular fears confusing Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. A fiction based on unconfirmed facts is thus built and now substitutes for any actual portrait I might actually have or have had. An uncorroborated story of a fictitious life grows into a kind of monstrosity the result of a program gone haywire. This picture is full of flaws and leads to the necessity of my eradication. ” (Warren Neidich)

Thanks again, first of all, for all your submissions to our open call. We will try to make up our minds now and be as non-biased as possible in judging all of the submitted works. The final selection for the exhibition will be announced in the course of March.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for updates about the rest of the GEGENkino 2017 programme! We will release the first items of it in the next days.

Your GEGENkino crew