FRIDAY 19 SEPTEMBER | 17:30 | SCREENING | CRITICAL ZONE

Anna Baranowski and Vlad Brăteanu employ hypnotic relaxation methods to evoke local stories tied to climate change and to the economic challenges inflicted by global politics and mass tourism. Lukas Marxt investigates Valley Pride, a region of industrial agriculture in California’s Sonoran Desert. Within this gigantism, designed for optimisation and the sole pursuit of profit, fertility and death collide under the looming threat of catastrophe—social, economic, ecological. Senem Gökce Ogultekin and Levent Duran conduct a collective experiment in the open-pit mine of Welzow-Süd, in eastern Germany. Through a physical approach to space, the body is displaced and the organ of sight becomes the centre of the body. In the Chilean desert, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva explore vast lithium mines and the remnants of colonial labour camps reactivated under Pinochet’s regime, bringing to light material trajectories whose planetary scope and historical depths remain unseen, hidden in plain sight.

The session will be followed by a drink.

Anna Baranowski, Vlad Brăteanu: Fill In The Blanks | Exp. film | 4k | colour | 0:11:05 | Roumania, Germany / Albania | 2022

Anna Baranowski and Vlad Brăteanu’s collaborative piece invites the audience to experience an intimate hypnotic induction. By making use of the hypnotic methodologies of relaxation - the sound of the sea and the soft human voice; images from the seaside, and the notions of rest and recovery that vacation recalls - the artist’s voices smoothly induce into the visitors’ consciousness local stories and realities of global warming, massive migration and economic challenges inflicted by global politics and mass tourism from Radhima, Vlora, a small village at the tip of the Albanian Riviera.

Biography

Anna Baranowski was born in Bytom, Poland in 1983. Today she lives secluded in a small village surrounded by the forests of East Germany and works on her art. In 2012, she received her diploma in media art with distinction from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. After her studies, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, such as the Berlin Biennale “Forget Fear“ in 2012. She has received grants, such as the Stiftung Kunstfonds working scholarship in 2018, and in recent years has been invited to various artist residencies, such as the Greater Columbus Arts Council in Columbus, USA, to develop new artistic works. Anna Baranowski looks at historical legacies in contemporary everyday life and reflects on collective psychological phenomena of human behaviour. In the field of experimental and documentary film, she focuses on direct cinema. She always uses documentary material in her works. In addition to her own cinematic images, composed in detail, the use of archival material is a central element of her experimental films. In doing so, she uses a wide variety of sources, such as amateur recordings, NASA or military footage. By taking them out of their original context, her works release new meanings. With documentary images that depict the real world, Anna Baranowski tells fictitious stories that are irritating and contrary to obvious expectations, which is precisely why they have an inner meaning and for this very reason trigger processes - the viewer is thrown back on himself and is confronted with his own feelings.

Vlad Brăteanu was born in Bacău, in the former Socialist Republic of Romania (RSR) in 1986. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Brăteanu holds a M.A. in Photography and Moving Image and a B.A. in Graphics from the National University of Arts in Bucharest. In 2016 he studied Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. His background in graphics forms the base for theoretical and conceptual considerations in which photography functions as a primary medium. Sound/hypnotic inductions, found objects, and public interventions that use playful semiotics of imagery are found in his current practice. Navigating the boundaries between public and private spaces, and finding signifiers for (in)visibility are translated into works that raise questions on precarity, fragility and stability in neoliberal societies. Research into the concept of plasticity and the effects of language are central in his artistic practice. Vlad is the co-founder of Template, an artist initiative and exhibition project that started in Bucharest in 2018 and is an alumnus of WHW Akademija in Zagreb in 2020.

Lukas Marxt: Valley Pride | Video | 4k | colour | 0:12:51 | Austria | 2023

The seemingly extraterrestrial camera eye floats upside down through a palm grove planted in a strictly rectilinear manner. Nature is literally upside down and existing in an artificial order as a business game. Only at the crescendo of the strange, vibrantly smoldering soundtrack by Jung an Tagen does the gaze slowly turn clockwise. Then, cut: quietness, open space.

At some point the logo “Valley Pride” can be read in the middle of the California desert, on oversized corrugated iron sheets, designating one of the most important commercial areas of US industrial agriculture. It’s an inhospitable place, whose increasingly bizarre unnaturalness is conveyed through Lukas Marxt’s unmistakable approach. Visually stunning, the monocultural agrarian symmetry and its ballet of irrigation testify to man’s self-extinction in the service of constant profit orientation – even if the necessarily anonymous workers return to the picture in this, Marxt’s fourth visual examination of the Imperial Valley. Under the sword of Damocles of unclear residence status and a US immigration policy that ranges from rigid to ignorant, the personal destinies and stories behind them must remain untold. The people are the smallest cog in the wheel of work in the gigantic agricultural machine trimmed for optimization, as it buries ecological and ethical standards under the relentless shoveling and plowing equipment. In front of endless rock formations and dancing mirages caused by the heat, they fertilize, harvest, and pack lettuce in a quasi-automated routine. In near-astonishment, the camera eye observes this hustle and bustle as it occurs in a leafy place where no greenery was intended. This is a place where fertility and death collide mercilessly and the threatening catastrophe – social, economic, ecological – is inscribed in every image, no matter how innocent. Here, beauty meets decay and exploitation as a man-made dystopia. That, too, is Valley Pride – a pride with an expiration date. (Sebastian Höglinger)

Biography

Lukas Marxt, born in 1983, Austria, is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.

Marxt has been sharing his research in the visual art environment as well as in the cinema context. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), at The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous International Film Festivals including Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival where he receiced the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018).

Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea.

Senem Gökce Ogultekin, Levent Duran: Void | Exp. film | Digital | colour | 0:16:57 | Germany / Turkey | 2024

While the shade of a tree is being stolen away, bodiless organs sit in the enormous gaps of the drained earth. Under the constant noise of unseen machines, disjointed body parts touch the drying soil and breaths are only audible to insects. In this quiet, distorted world, old songs of goodwill are sung: “Future times of vain sorrow do not disturb our gentle sleep...” While we are waiting for the miracle to come the sand continues to fly. “VOID” explores the possibility of connecting sensuously to environments devastated by human intervention, such as an open coal mine in Lower Lusatia. Instead of placing the subject in the center of attention as an “identity”, the body itself transforms into a landscape and the landscape becomes the protagonist.

Biography

Senem Gökce Ogultekin work spans the disciplines of choreography, performance, vocal work and film. In 2019, "Dun/Home" was chosen for Artist´s Film International, an international event initiated by Whitechapel Gallery in London and was shown at various museums and galleries of the world. In 2020, Senem Gökce Ogultekin was awarded the Allbau Foundation Culture Prize and was appointed to the Young College by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2021.

Levent Duran is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. They studied sociology at Istanbul University and film at the Fine Arts University of Hamburg, where they obtained their master's degree. Their writings have been published in major magazines and newspapers in Turkey, and their visual creations (video, painting, sculpture, installation) have been exhibited internationally. Their film project "Murmuring Draft Dodgers" received the Courageous Citizen Award from the European Cultural Foundation.

Arjuna Neuman, Denise Ferreira da Silva: Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims | Exp. film | 4k | colour | 0:49:00 | United Kingdom / Chile | 2023

A speculative and poetic exploration of the entanglements and overlaps of historical events in the Atacama Desert (Chile), the film, told from the perspective of the wind, takes us on a visual journey, floating freely through the many sites and histories of the Atacama. Exploring some of the largest lithium mines in the world; hovering above the remnants of colonial labour camps reactivated under the Pinochet regime, and slipping inside the international observatory of the ALMA large array facility, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s camera uncovers material trajectories whose planetary scope and historical depths remain invisible to the many.

By pointing at how these trajectories mutated and expanded into aspects of modern geopolitical issues, “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims” exposes pillars of western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism while simultaneously proposing another worldview, one that is carried and echoed by the wind.

“’Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims’ is the latest film in a series called “Elemental Cinema”, which we began to conceive in 2016; and for which we have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as a starting point. Part documentary and part personal essay, each film in this series, is dedicated to one of the four classical elements: earth, water, fire, and air which is the element chosen in “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims”, a film that follows the wind and what it carries as a guide and an analytical framework. Merging poetics and critical theory, this work proposes a sensuous, poignant and emotional take on the ethico-political challenges of the global present, through human and nonhuman perspectives. Our aim, then, is to undermine ways of thinking about, and relating to the Earth which have been inherited from European colonial modernity.”

Biography

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer and he is the co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees. Neuman works with the essay as a guiding, multi-perspectival and inherently future-oriented form that underpins his experimental research and creative approach. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She currently is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of “Toward a Global Idea of Race” (2007), “Unpayable Debt” (2022) amongst many other titles.

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film “Serpent Rain” (2016), “4 Waters-Deep Implicancy” (2018), “Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum” (2020), “Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims” (2023).

Their films have been exhibited at major art venues such as MACBA (Barcelona); Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), and more. In Februrary 2024, they opened a retrospective of their work at the Munch Museum in Oslo; in May 2024 the Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp opened a solo exhibition of their work. They have a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books.