Screening ProgramTerritories of the In/Human

Screening Program July 6 – 24, 2010
With films and videos by
bankleer, Patricia Esquivias, Korpys / Löffler, Elena Kovylina, Christine Meisner, Olivier Menanteau, Damir Ocko, Monika Oechsler, Amie Siegel, Helene Sommer, José Carlos Teixeira, Alexey Terehoff, Ingrid Wildi

– Tuesday, July 6, 2010, 7pm
Specters of Postcommunism

Aliaksei Tserakhau, Lyapis Trubetskoy “Capital”, 2007, 3’17’’
Elena Kovylina, Dying Swans, 2008, 8’ 36”
bankleer, Lenas Gespenster, 2007, 25’
Helene Sommer, A Tale of Stone and Wood, 2009, 21’05’’
Damir Ocko, The Boy with the Magic Horn, 2007, 15’

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Aliaksei Tserakhau, Lyapis Trubetskoy “Capital”, 2007
Music video of Lyapis Trubetskoy’s song Capital.

Elena Kovylina, Dying Swans, 2008
More than 200 journalists have been killed or gone missing in Russia over the last ten years. The film Dying Swans, which is devoted to them, refers to a particular ritual from the former Soviet Union: Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, which since Stalin’s death has been broadcast whenever a Soviet leader has passed away.

bankleer, Lenas Gespenster (Lenas Ghosts), 2007
Lenas ghosts is an evaluation of the post-communist condition. (…) The Soviet Unions founding father, deceased 80 years ago, conjures a time of turmoil, revolt, and the Red Terror. Lenin’s ghost haunts not only the museum which bears his name in Volgograd, but also our consciousness. Today what is left of the social utopia where community spirit and the integrity of individuals supposedly reigned? (…). (bankleer)

Helene Sommer, A Tale of Stone and Wood, 2009
The Bulgarian mountain village Kovatchevitsa became popular in the nineteen-seventies as a favored film location for the Bulgarian film industry. The video interlinks fragments from a selection of these films with the artist’s own footage shot at different sites within the village. The village appears as a blank space overloaded with various projections, where both the real and the fictitious historical narratives—from the Ottoman era to that of postcommunism—are superimposed.

Damir Ocko, The Boy with the Magic Horn, 2007
During the transition period, Croatia abandoned one of the biggest projects ever to be built in the northern hemisphere: a university hospital that would occupy almost 250.000 square meters. The hospital (…) forms the architectural backdrop for The Boy with a Magic Horn: derelict halls, bare concrete walls, labyrinths of unmarked rooms and nature invading the whole environment. Based on a Wagnerian scenario, the video depicts a dreamy and hallucinogenic game that alien characters play in order to describe their new social and emotional displacement (…) (Damir Ocko)