"The Stars Down to Earth" is the title of this year’s Forum Expanded programme and is taken from the text of the same name by Theodor W. Adorno in which he grapples with the role of the irrational in mass culture. The search for ways to enable art to deal with an increasingly intangible reality forms an essential similarity between the selected works. Bringing one’s gaze back down to earth now seems more necessary than ever before. Yet how can one use film to take hold of something real when that very concept is ever harder to grasp? The films and installations in the programme approach this question by attempting to both look and listen as closely as possible.
In the video installation TWELVE, for example, Jeamin Cha examines the pragmatic process underpinning the annual secret wage negotiations held between Korean employer and employee associations. Berlin artist Sandra Schäfer’s video installation CONSTRUCTED FUTURES: HARET HREIK investigates city planning and redevelopment in Beirut and the political and religious ideologies they contain. In her film STUDIES ON THE ECOLOGY OF DRAMA, Eija-Liisa Athila explores ways of finding film images that move beyond cinematographic anthropocentrism by shifting her gaze away from people and onto their environment. The Karrabing Film Collective from Australia, whose work WUTHARR, SALTWATER DREAMS is being presented in the group exhibition, shows three different variants of one and the same story, demonstrating how different approaches to a problem don’t just bring forth contradictory solutions but also mutually complimentary ones. For his part, Joe Namy does away with pictorial representation almost entirely. His installation PURPLE, BODIES IN TRANSLATION – PART II OF A YELLOW MEMORY FROM THE YELLOW AGE merely shows a purple-colour surface, while the soundtrack explores the question of which details are lost in translation and what additional elements and contradictions are created by the differences between subtitles and image.
Exhibition at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg
Sandra Schäfer - Constructed Futures: Haret Hreik, 2017, 27 minTake to the Sea - Hawamesh Aan Al-Hegra / Footnotes on Migration, 2016, 10 minOliver Husain - Isla Santa Maria 3D, 2016, 18 minPhilip Scheffner, Merle Kröger, Izadora Nistor - Izadora (listening to versions of herself), 2017, 8 minRIWAQ - Bawabet Yafa / Jaffa Gate, 2016, 4 minNoam Enbar - Pana Ha’Geshem / The Rain is Gone, 2016, 17 minJoe Namy - Purple, Bodies in Translation - Part II of A Yellow Memory from the Yellow Age, 2017, 15 minJeamin Cha - Twelve, 2016, 33 minMike Crane - UHF42 E01+E02, 2017, 40 minJames Benning - Untitled Fragments, 2017, 75 minOraib Toukan - When Things Occur, 2016, 28 minKarrabing Film Collective - Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams, 2016, 29 min
as well as:Katrin Winkler - Towards Memory, 2016, 32 min
Exhibition opening 8.2., 19:00Opening hours 9.2. to 20.2. daily 11:00 to 21:00?Artist Talks in the exhibition9.2., 14:0018.2., 14:00Finissage 20.2., 19:00 to 21:00Guided tours through the exhibition11.2., 14:3012.2., 14:3019.2., 14:30Registration required, limited access: [email protected]
Akademie der Künste Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
The works for this edition of Forum Expanded were selected by Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (head curator), Anselm Franke (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Nanna Heidenreich (ifs internationale filmschule köln), Khaled Abdulwahed (filmmaker and artist) and Ulrich Ziemons (Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art), with Bettina Steinbrügge (Kunstverein in Hamburg) acting as a consultant.