Screening programme > MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE

In the frameworks of the finissage of the exhibition MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE by Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze and Miloš Trakilović, on 5 May 2023 (Friday) from 6 pm, we will be screening a selection of films by the artists.

Screening programme

Hito Steyerl: Journal No. 1 - An Artist's Impression (2007) 22'

Miloš Trakilović: All but war is simulation (2022) 24'27"

Hito Steyerl: Abstract (2012) 7'30"

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze: The Invisible Hand of My Father (2018) 24'02"

The exhibition MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE is on view until 7 May 2023.

Free entrance, all are welcome!

***

Hito Steyerl: Journal No. 1 - An artist's impression (2007)

Two years after the end of the Second World War, Film Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo, and four years after the collapse of the Communist bloc this newsreel, which has only survived on nitrate film, was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. In Journal No. 1 – An artist’s impression Hito Steyerl attempts to find out what was on this film document from Sarajevo’s Sutjeska studio. She listens to eyewitnesses, and according to her instructions artist Arman Kulasic made a number of drawings that resemble storyboards for some lost film. In the simultaneous projection of Journal No. 1 – An artist’s impression the unattainability of a historical zero hour of the national identity takes concrete form: What appears to be a moment of great change in this look back (the newsreel reported on a literacy campaign, Muslim women confidently removed their headscarves, Communist Yugoslavia under Tito celebrated modernization through education in its early films) remains limited by subjective memory. Instead the artist, who was in fact intended to serve merely as a “medium” for the off-screen voices, is himself given a voice: He was affected by ethnic cleansing during the fighting. Whenever there are no documentary images available, Steyerl employs images from fiction films produced at Sutjeska (the anti-Fascist Valter brani Sarajevo [Walter Saves Sarajevo] and Do You Remember Dolly Bell? by Emir Kusturica), without however intending to make a complete reconstruction: multiethnic Yugoslavia remains fragmentary, both in general history and the history of film, a country between the images.

Miloš Trakilović: All but war is simulation (2022)

All But War Is Simulation is a lecture-based 2 channel video installation. The work seeks to address the status of representations of violence in images and media by combining theory, popular culture, poetry and personal experiences with overarching themes of migration, militarization, and digital technology.

The work is concerned with the (im)perceptibility of conflict, examining how warfare is visualized and mediatized in the context of technological globalization and analyzing ways in which modern-day mechanisms of visuality are still governed by a logic of warfare.

Hito Steyerl: Abstract (2012)

Abstract (2012) is a two-channel video commemorating a childhood friend of Steyerl’s called Andrea Wolf, who became an activist and revolutionary and was eventually killed in the Kurdish region of Turkey in 1998 when fighting for the PKK. Wolf was already subject of Steyerl’s films November (2004) and Lovely Andrea (2007), and Abstract shows Steyerl visiting the site where her friend died, examining ammunition casings that most likely killed her. Instead of including any pictures of Wolf, the Kurdish guide recounts the circumstances surrounding her death.  On the other screen Steyerl is in Berlin, taking pictures on her phone of an office of Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of weapons sold by the German government to the Turkish Army. Combining cinematography, globalisation and warfare, the film reveals how the political and private are closely interconnected.

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze: The Invisible Hand of My Father (2018)

With an evocative mix of drone footage, 3-D animation, interviews, and voiceovers in a DIY aesthetic, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze tells the story of his father, a former car-factory manager turned migrant construction worker who lost his hand on the job in Portugal just as the financial crisis of 2009 was wreaking havoc all over the world. It was the “invisible hand of the market” that took his father away from his home when post-Soviet economic malaise hit Georgia. Now he is back home and lives as a farmer with a prosthesis that he prefers not to use, as it only impedes him. His lost hand, however, is still somewhere out there, a rogue phantom limb, still working invisibly and providing its owner with a livelihood in the form of a pension. This gives the film a bittersweet ending, in which leisure and irony win out over the physical sacrifices of work done for inscrutable, often sinister, market forces.