Series Description
Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far
Curated by Omar Kholeif | 2010 — 2016 | TRT: 02:28:16
A Pilot For A Show About Nowhere
A Pilot For A Show About Nowhere
O, Persecuted
I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard
Beirut Exploded Views
The Empirical Effect
Video Details
Rosa Barba | 2010 | 22:01 | Germany / Italy / Netherlands | English / Italian | Color | 16:9
The surrounding environment around the volcano becomes a mythical wonderland, interspersed here by Barba with aerial and close-up images, as well as archival footage, revealing a world that is haunted by the threat of eruption, of exposure, but which also functions as shelter to many.
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Storyteller
Alone With You
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Doug Ischar | 2011 | 18:13 | United States | English | Color | 4:3
Is Doug Ischar in love with the commodity value of Mapplethorpe? His impossible need to attain a now unattainable object? As Ischar’s film unfolds, it becomes a lacerating critique of market desires and values.
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Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week
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Steve Reinke | 2016 | 14:01 | Canada / United States | English | B&W and Color | 16:9
Reinke’s film is the most recent selected here; produced in 2016, it foreshadows in cornucopic style a world that we must find a way to exit – to create spaces of unity and freedom of our own making, as banal and quotidian as that may first seem.
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How can one even start to articulate the conditions that determine the artistic output of a decade that has begun to experience such violent rupture? How does one give voice to a decade that began with the utopia of post-millennial transparency only to descend into a whirlpool of continual lies? ‘Post-truth’ is the accommodating misnomer that has been instrumentalized by news media to articulate the ‘alternative facts’ that have been propagated by the presidential campaign and policies of the newly-elected President of the United States, former reality TV star and real-estate mogul, Donald Trump.
Continue reading Omar Kholeif's essay Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far
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Dr. Omar Kholeif is a writer, curator and cultural historian who has curated more than 100 exhibitions, special projects and commissions globally. At the heart of his work is a mission to change the way that people see and engage with hidden histories in an era of fast-paced social and economic change and hyper-mediated technological evolution.
Kholeif is currently Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, where he oversees collection strategy, development, and acquisition, as well as attendant exhibition, publishing and discursive opportunities. Before joining the Foundation, he was Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Senior Curator at Cornerhouse and HOME, Manchester. He has also served as an artistic director and consultant for numerous international film and art festivals.
Featured titles
A Pilot For A Show About Nowhere is a two-channel video that examines the politics of television viewership, incorporating footage from a number of sources to create a plurivocal narrative.
O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian Militant film Our Small Houses into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.
Matt Wolf returns to Joe Brainard's iconic poem I Remember (1970) in this videowork. His archival montage combines audio recordings of Brainard reading from the poem, as well as an interview with his lifelong friend and collaborator, the poet Ron Padgett. The result is an inventive biography of Joe Brainard, and an elliptical dialog about friendship, nostalgia, and the strange wonders of memory.
In a city post-apocalypse, young men communicate only through smart devices. They make home out of urban debris. They can’t speak to each other, but are still able to dream.
"Living on the slopes of the volcano Vesuvius is a strange contradiction: always in stress and yet also sleepy, waiting for what might happen. In close cooperation with the Osservatorio Vesuviano and several inhabitants of the 'Red Zone' of the volcano, Rosa Barba constructs a lyrical portrait of this area, which shelters Mafia members and illegal Chinese immigrants. Historic footage, measurements, maps, and aerial shots try to capture what is always uncertain."
— International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2010
Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelry-like space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on buildings and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.
At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.
Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week is the follow up to A Boy Needs a Friend. Reinke proposes a new holiday with the motto MORE RAGE LESS DISGUST: David Wojnarowicz Week and takes us through his seven days of celebration.
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