Film: “Free Fall” by Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl
4 November – 19 December 2010

Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road
London E3 5QZ
+44 (0) 20 8981 4518
mail@chisenhale.org.uk
http://www.chisenhale.org.uk

Chisenhale Gallery presents Hito Steyerl’s first major solo exhibition in London. In Free Fall (2010), a new film co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, Picture This, Bristol and Collective, Edinburgh, incorporates a series of works—After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash—which employs the setting and characters of an aeroplane junkyard in the Californian desert to tell the story of the current economic climate.

The space of the junkyard allows various ‘crash’ narratives to unfold, with the stories of actual crashes and the remnants and afterlife of these machines becoming metaphors for economic decline. This is an investigation of planes as they are parked during the economic downturn, stored and recycled, revealing unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle, finding perfect example in the form of the Boeing 4X-JYI, an aircraft first acquired by film director Howard Hughes for TWA, which was subsequently flown by the Israeli Airforce before finding its way to the Californian desert to be blown up for the Hollywood blockbuster Speed. Through intertwined narratives of people, planes and places Steyerl reveals cycles of capitalism incorporating and adapting to the changing status of the commodity, but also points at a horizon beyond this endless repetition.

A prolific writer, filmmaker, theorist and teacher, Steyerl’s research and interests cover topics as diverse as cultural globalisation, feminism, culture, migration and racism. Her films are a montage of politics and pop, Hollywood and independent film, interviews and voice-over commentaries, which present provocative filmic analyses of the present.

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966) is based in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Picture This, Bristol; Collective, Edinburgh; Henie Onstad Centre, Høvikodden; Villa Stuck, Munich; Collective, Edinburgh (all 2010); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2009); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008). Group exhibitions include Taipei Biennial; 1st Ural Biennial; Gwangju Biennial; ‘Antiphotojournalism’, La Virreina, Barcelona; ‘Horizons’, BAK, Utrecht (all 2010); ‘Dispersion’, ICA, London; U-Turn Kvadriennale for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen (both 2008); ‘documenta 12’, Kassel (2007) and ‘Manifesta 5’, San Sebastian (2004).

TALKS & EVENTS
Wednesday 17 November, 7pm Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism (2009, Zero Books) and lecturer at Goldsmiths and University of East London, presents a talk in which he asks the question: ‘Can anything genuinely new emerge in a political landscape that is clogged with ideological junk?’

Saturday 27 November, 2pm A panel discussion focusing on the notion of the ‘biography of the object’ with Hito Steyerl, Peter Osborne, Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, and Eyal Weizman, Director of Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and chaired by Melissa Gronlund, Managing Editor, Afterall.

Thursday 2 December, 7pm Screening of Hito Steyerl’s November (2004) and On Three Posters. Reflections on a video-performance (2004) by Rabih Mroué.

The exhibition is supported by IFA, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and Creative Scotland.

Chisenhale Exhibitions Partner 2010: Outset Contemporary Art Fund

Chisenhale Gallery is funded by Arts Council England and is a registered charity no. 1026175

For more information please contact mail@chisenhale.org.uk or +44 20 8981 4518

Art: The Financial Crisis by Superflex

The Financial Crisis (Session I-V) is a new film work in which SUPERFLEX address the financial crisis and meltdown from a therapeutic perspective. A hypnotist guides us through our worst nightmares to reveal the crisis without as the psychosis within. During 4 sessions you will experience the fascination of speculation and power, fear, anxiety and frustration of loosing control, economic loss and personal disaster.

Session 1 – The Invisible Hand
Session 2 – George Soros
Session 3 – You
Session 4 – Old Friends

The Financial Crisis (Session I-V) has been created for Frieze Film 2009 and is screened on Channel 4’s innovative ‘3 Minute Wonder’ slot from Monday 12 October to Thursday15th October, at 7.55pm

The Financial Crisis (Session I-V) is also presented at the Frieze Art Fair from Wednesday 14th October to Sunday 18th October, 2009.

http://www.superflex.net/thefinancialcrisis/

Film: Popular Unrest by Melanie Gilligan

Popular Unrest, is a multi-episode drama set in a future much like the present. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. A rash of unexplained killings have broken out across the globe. They often take place in public but witnesses never see an assailant. Just as mysteriously, groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere, amassing new members rapidly. Unaccountably, they feel a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another.

The film explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital. Hotels offer bed-warming servants with every room, people are fined for not preventing foreseeable illness, weight watching foods eat the digester from the inside and the unemployed repay their debt to society in physical energy. If on the one hand this suggests the complete domination of life by exchange value do the groupings offer a way out?

Shot in London with a cast of twelve main actors, the film’s form is partly inspired by David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ and American television dramas CSI, Dexter and Bones, where reality is perceived through a pornographic forensics of empirical and visceral phenomena. As with Gilligan’s recent video works, the film’s episodic structure takes its cue from television and the medium’s ability to dispense its storyline in stages.

Melanie Gilligan was born in Toronto in 1979. She currently lives in London and New York and works in a variety of media including video, performance, text, installation and music. Gilligan completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2002 and was a Fellow with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Programme in 2004-5. Recent exhibitions include: Transmission Gallery Glasgow (2008) as part of the Glasgow International Festival and Franco Soffiantino Gallery, Turin (2009). In 2008 Gilligan released Crisis in the Credit System, a four-part fictional mini drama about the recent financial crisis, made specifically for internet viewing and distribution, commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction. She has recently completed a single screen film Self-capital (2009), commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts London as part of the group exhibition ‘Talk Show’. In October 2009 Gilligan was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.

http://www.popularunrest.org/

Video: Penetration

Penetration
2006, 4min 19 sec; Format 16:9; Dimensions variable, Edition of 7
Lia Chavez
London, UK
www.liachavez.com

My current video practice explores a hallucinatory, sensation-centered view of space, time and the world in which chance apparitions and ephemera are elevated to the same status as solid, pictorial objects. I am interested in non-narrative, non-rational uses of video, employing it to depict intuitive, fictional and speculative events and the molten realities which emerge from them.

The video is entitled Penetration, (2006). Filmed in London’s Piccadilly Circus, this silent video depicts the deconstruction of capitalist icons by fragmenting familiar symbols and logos and reassembling them in a chaotic, mesmerizing visual collage. http://www.vimeo.com/5109503

Event: Age of Stupid

Upcoming screening event: Age of Stupid

22nd August 2009, 8pm
On the roof of the Bootstrap building in Dalston – backdropped by the largest solar panel installation in London.
FREE in, popcorn and cheap bar.

Entrance to roof through reception (beside Cafe Oto)
The Print House
18 Ashwin St
Dalston
London E8 3DL

The movie is about climate change. A man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looks back at “archive” footage from 2007 and asks: why didn’t we do something when we had the chance?

more info here: http://www.ageofstupid.net/

Workshop: Images of Ebb 1.08.09 @ Volume

The Images of Ebb workshop will introduce participants to Sousveillance and CCTV filmmaking where material and images from the Deptford.TV archive will be edited to submissions from Sounds of Ebb.

Footage taken from Deptford.TV was filmed during a previous TV hacking workshop where participants equipped with CCTV surveillance signal receivers were lead through the city by incoming surveillance camera signals. CCTV video signal receivers cached surveillance camera signals into public and private spaces and were made visible: surveillance became sousveillance.

By making images visible which normally remain hidden, we gain access to the “surveillance from above” enabling us to use these images to create personal narratives of the city. The Images of Ebb workshop will look at constructing a narrative to the Sounds of Ebb.

Sound of Ebb (a branch project of The End of Something) is an open source sound series that asks sound artists and artists working with sound to respond to the question: What is the sound of Recession? Contributions are collected internationally reflecting the affects of crisis and recession from various social contexts and geographic locations. Together the Sounds of Ebb and images from Sousveillance produce articulations of a local city in crisis with global resonances of recession.

Deptford.TV is a research project on collaborative film – initiated by Adnan Hadzi in collaboration with the Deckspace media lab, Bitnik media collective, Boundless project, Liquid Culture initiative, and Goldsmiths College.

It is an online media database documenting the urban change of Deptford, in Sout East London. Deptford TV functions as an open, collaborative platform that allows artists, filmmakers and people living and working around Deptford to store, share, re-edit and redistribute the documentation of Deptford. http://deptford.tv

Video: Economy of Contribution

Economy of Contribution and Metadata
Feb 2009

“Interviews with Professor Scott Lash, Research Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Professor Robert Zimmer, Co-Diretcor of Goldsmiths Digital Studios and Head of the Department of Computing, and Goetz Bachmann at Goldsmiths University London and Bernard Stiegler, French philosopher and Director of the Department of Cultural Development at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris.

The interviews were conducted in response to several recent conferences, lectures and colloquiums held at Goldsmiths College that revolved around the Metadata research project at the Centre for Cultural Studies and visiting Professor Bernard Stiegler’s series of talks on the Economy of Contribution.”

Interview part 1: Scott Lash, Robert Zimmer, Goetz Bachmann from Studio Incite on Vimeo.

Interview part 2: Bernard Stiegler from Studio Incite on Vimeo.

Video: Noam Chomsky on “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours”

Noam Chomsky on “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours”
3 July 2009
Chomsky-double-web, Democracy Now

“Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, author and dissident intellectual, just turned eighty years old this past December. He has written over 100 books, but despite being called “the most important intellectual alive” by the New York Times, he is rarely heard in the corporate media. We spend the hour with Noam Chomsky. He spoke recently here in New York at an event sponsored by the Brecht Forum. More than 2,000 people packed into Riverside Church in Harlem to hear his address, titled “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours.” In his talk, Chomsky discussed the global economic crisis, the environment, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, resistance to American empire and much more.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/3/noam_chomsky_on_crisis_and_hope

Video: Charts Music – Songsmith fed with Stock Charts

Charts Music – Songsmith fed with Stock Charts
Johannes Kreidler
Berlin, Germany
http://www.kreidler-net.de/

Submitted by: Johannes Kreidler

Video: Chris Harman: The Crisis Now

Chris Harman: The Crisis Now

Marxism 2009, Bloomsbury, 5 July 2009

contributed by SWP