Screening I.

From Thursday, April 9, 2020, 5 pm, until Sunday, May 3, 2020, 11 pm

With video works by John Bock, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Eduard Constantin, Antje Ehmann / Eva Stotz, Clarissa Thieme

Total length: 110 min

Antje Ehmann / Eva Stotz

Labour in a Single Shot: Marseille.

Portrait of a city composed by Labour-in-a-Single-Shot films, 2018

HD video, color, sound, 36:13 min

Antje Ehmann (*1968 in Gelsenkirchen, lives in Berlin) is a curator, writer, and artist. She has addressed the history of film and urban development in numerous exhibitions, artistic projects, and publications. Until his death in 2014, Ehmann also worked together with filmmaker and author Harun Farocki, with whom she initiated the serial project Labour in a Single Shot in 2011. Eva Stotz (*1979 in Isny, lives in Berlin) is a documentary filmmaker and director whose works include examinations of the effects of globalization. Stotz and Ehmann have continued Labour in a Single Shot since 2017. They conduct workshops around the world in which they produce videos of one to two minutes’ length, recorded in a single shot. The camera can be static, panning, or moving—the only prerequisite is that there are no cuts. Their object of investigation is work in its many and varied forms: paid or unpaid, material or immaterial, traditional or new forms of labor in the digital sector. The topic of cinematic work itself, various methods of image production, and collective work are further themes that are addressed in Labour in a Single Shot.

Marseille. Portrait of a city composed by Labour-in-a-Single-Shot films was created in 2018 during a workshop in Marseille and consists of 20 individual portraits of the following occupations: film projectionist, knife sharpener, orange vendor, bodybuilder, fish pedicurist, technician, fishmonger, hairdresser, helper for illiterate people, animal vendor, video editor, firefighter, writer, construction machine operator, butcher, tailor, clothes sorter, construction worker, musician, street sweeper.

Eduard Constantin

When Living in the West – The Neighbours, 2004–2005

SD video, color, sound, 6:36 min

Eduard Constantin (*1977 in Ploiesti, Romania, lives in Bucharest) is an artist and co-founder of the non-profit digital platform e-cart.ro, which is dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art. Constantin’s video works and drawings are often based on seemingly casual observations and are permeated by political issues.

Living in the West – The Neighbours was created in 2004–2005 after the artist returned to his hometown of Ploiesti. The video captures a strolling view of the city from a static perspective. The balcony of Constantin’s apartment in the city district Vest (English: West) becomes a place for observing and reflecting on post-communist urban and social change taking place in the district, as well as on city live, alienation, and self-observation. At what point, the artist asks, do we accept it as socially given that our horizon is largely defined by the apartment block opposite and the daily activities of our neighbors on their balconies; or that children use supermarket and gas station parking lots as playgrounds?

Eduard Constantin is represented in the collection of the n.b.k. Video-Forum with another work (Outside View, 2004) since 2019.

Clarissa Thieme

Today is 11th June 1993, 2018

Ultra HD video, color, sound, 12:45 min

In an interplay of fictional and documentary elements, the artist and filmmaker Clarissa Thieme (*1976 in Oldenburg, lives in Berlin) addresses the functions of memory, identity politics, and processes of translation in her work.

The work Today is 11th June 1993 (2018) is based on a found object in the form of a video by Nedim Alikadic, which the artist discovered in the Library Hamdija-Kresevljakovic Video Archive, which collects images of the siege of Sarajevo that took place from 1992 to 1996. Infused with a sense of playfulness and dark humor, the video document presents a group of young people imagining their escape from the besieged city with the help of a time machine: “Today is the 11th of June, 1993. The war has been going for a very long time. I’ve tried everything to get out, to save myself; nothing has worked. The only thing left is to make this videotape, which I will give to my son, he to his, and so on, until a time machine is invented and someone watching this will comes and get me out of this.” The use of a synchronous translator (Grace Sungeun Kim), who translates the dialogues into English, gives the video a further level of relevance as it addresses the future anew.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, 2013

HD video, color, sound, 17:47 min

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz live in Berlin and have worked together since 2007. Their artistic practice manifests itself in films, performances, songs, objects, and texts. They collaborate with dancers, choreographers, and visual artists with whom they share a long history of dealing with conditions of performance and violent hierarchies of bodies, but also of companionship, glamour, and resistance.

In the video work To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013), six performers play the eponymous score from 1970 by the US avant-garde composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016). Oliveros developed the piece after reading the radically feminist SCUM Manifesto (1967) by Valerie Solanas, who later became famous as the woman who shot Andy Warhol. The composition challenges the performers, Rachel Aggs, Peaches, Catriona Shaw, Verity Susman, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and William Wheeler, to choose five pitches each and to play very long tones, either modulated or unmodulated. In the middle section of the piece the performers are invited to imitate each other’s pitches and modulations, whereas they interact not only with each other and their instruments, but also with the iconic GDR architecture of the Funkhaus Berlin from 1951.

The piece To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation aims to avoid the hierarchies between musicians. Its instructions are designed to create a “continuous circulation of power” (Oliveros) between listening and sounding. The cues in the piece are given collectively through light: a red section is followed by a yellow section and then a blue section, and two further cues are given by strobe light.

The exhibition Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. The Right to Have Rights opened at the n.b.k. Showroom on March 6, 2020 with the artists’ latest video installation that can be viewed online here.

John Bock

In Schmerzen heimeln, 2019

Full HD video, color, sound, 37:30 min

In his works, John Bock (*1965 in Gribbohm, lives in Berlin) brings together live actions, drawings, sculptures, installations, film sets, and film projections to create a Gesamtkunstwerk. His spatial arrangements, which are characterized by material combinations, can become a place for live actions, which the artist calls “lectures”. His work is built on a darkly tinted humor, which expresses itself not least on a linguistic level by means of neologisms, repetitions, onomatopoeia, and surprising language combinations. His movies and environments draw on expressionist film as well as western, horror or thriller movies. Even though his films and live actions elude clear interpretations, there is an obvious desire behind Bock’s oeuvre to constantly expand the concept of art. His main concern is the dissolution of boundaries in art, whether as to the abolition of genre boundaries and of static work concepts or as to the relationship between recipient and artist.

The video In Schmerzen heimeln deliberately dispenses with the element of language as it introduces viewers to the gloomy atmosphere of the so-called “Leibraum”. The walls of the room are lined with metal plates. Mounted at head level is a horizontal grating that holds worn agricultural machinery and a dripping body. An agate snail crawls along chessboard figures crafted from toast bread. The eerie soundscape, with crackling, scraping, and hissing noises, along with the cool tones of an undulating, wandering light, create a gripping atmosphere. In the video, the artist appears together with the actor Frank Seppeler and invites viewers into the milieu of the scarily absurd and oppressive.

n.b.k. thanks all the artists for their consent in being part of this presentation.

Founded in 1971, the n.b.k. Video-Forum with more than 1.700 works of international video art is the oldest and one of the biggest collections of video art in Germany. With the help of the artists’ funding scheme by the Berlin Senate’s Department for Culture and Europe, it was once more possible for the Video-Forum to add further pieces of international video art to its collection.

Screening II.

Online here from Monday, May 4 till Sunday, May 24, 2020.

With video works by Candice Breitz, Lia Perjovschi, Tomas Schmit, Hito Steyerl

Total length: 118 min