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Petrit Halilaj The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real 2010 Installation view Courtesy the artist © Petrit Halilaj / photo Uwe Walter |
The sickening reality that contemporary neo-liberalism is tied to a commerce relying on the perpetuation of others' misery also becomes the premise for Dutch artist Renzo Martens’ 90-minute self-reflexive documentary Episode III. The film captures the artist and multiple photojournalists as they travel through the Congo producing images for Western media of dead and dying in one of the poorest regions of the world. A fluorescent sign blinking “Enjoy please Poverty” brazenly announces their project wherever they go. The film proposes that Congo’s dire humanitarian conditions—widespread war, rape, starvation and extreme poverty—are the only “resource” left to the Congolese post-globalization, and that in this aspect, too, they are being exploited by others for capitalist profit. In an attempt to improve the economic situation of the community, Martens trains a small group of Congelese photographers to make images of their own misery for sale to foreign markets. In the end, however, the experiment fails—not because the images lack “quality,” but because the photographers are non-accredited and do not have access to Western distribution channels for the sale of their photographs. The project ends in resignation and despair, a return, in fact, to the reality of the way things are. Martens’ film takes you on an emotional rollercoaster ride, but you are never sure where to direct your anger or your sorrow. His relationship to his subjects is ethically dubious and as a consumer of the film you become implicated as well. Episode III reveals the limits of representation and the extremely closed logic of late capitalism in all its ugliness.
These films and videos, as well as much of the photography in the exhibition, draws on documentary traditions, but the familiar objective distance or othering that documentary authority relies upon are often subverted. Collins, Boulos and Martens are clearly present in their works, as is Minerva Cuevas in Dissidence v 2.0 and Bernard Bazile in Les Manifs (Protest Marches). Bombastic in their presentation, Cuevas and Bazile draw on their ongoing and extensive archives of economic and labour protests in their respective cities of Mexico City and Paris to document collective action in public space. Separated only by geography, these artists are participants within the unified political resistance that they record.
The performing subject and reality as performance are recurring tropes in the biennale. The films of Avi Mograbi and Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir aggressively test the political and social limits of their subjects. Here the ubiquitous running camera becomes a weapon to cajole subjects into either revealing who they really are or into performing another self. Mograbi’s partly staged encounters with Israeli border guards reveal the recorder’s ambivalent political position. In Beyond Guilt, Sela and Amir instigate and voyeuristically record sexual encounters in Israeli bar toilets. Intimate sexual encounters intermingle with dialogues about war and power and are performed for the camera to bring personal and public conquest into close proximity. The camera’s transgressive potential is also unleashed in Mohamed Bourouissa’s Temps Mort, a series of enlarged cellphone photographs covertly shot by a prisoner and co-produced by Bourouissa. Produced over the course of a year, these images reveal the prisoner’s point of view and create a public space for psychic and imaginary liberty through images.
"What is Waiting Out There" has been criticized for being overly pessimistic and humourless, and for the most part it is. It is a tough show both in its content and in its pacing, which requires viewers to relentlessly watch dozens of hours of difficult footage with little time to think. The arrangement of works is often didactic and heavy-handed, making for an exhausting experience that nullifies the art’s potential poignancy and restricts dialogue. Yet even in Rhomberg’s reality, the apparent darkness of our time is sometimes illuminated by moments of levity and empathetic gesture. Anna Witt’s video Die Geburt, Ferhat Özgür’s video Metamorphosis Chat and Friedl Vom Gröller’s silent black-and-white 16-mm film Passage Briare all capture intimate encounters between the artists and their subjects. These short, charming films are about performing the identity of the other and they situate the artists’ subjectivities squarely in the frame.
Similarly, curator Marc Siegel’s selection of 24 films from San Francisco underground movie pioneer and video artist George Kuchar’s epic series Weather Diaries firmly situates the artist as both subject and narrator of his own reality. Since 1985, Kuchar has spent every May in a low-budget hotel in El Reno, Oklahoma's "tornado alley," watching the weather and monitoring his own scatological torrents. The films, which are appropriately tucked away in a working-class industrial park in west Kreuzberg, are low-budget too: shot and edited in camera on a consumer-grade machine, they champion a campy, homemade aesthetic that mashes up references to Hollywood movies with diaristic documentary form. Kuchar’s banal and often disjointed Weather Diaries reveal the gap between his projected desires and his actual existence.
Rhomberg’s support of significant solo shows by both Kuchar and Menzel in "What is Waiting Out There" makes a strong point about the continued relevance and return of realism, particularly in a time of crisis. Over a century apart, Kuchar and Menzel become curious counterparts in a biennale that attempts to resituate the dialogue about reality, realism and the real from the margins of history and politics to another extreme—a place with the potential to disrupt the all-encompassing lie that is our current reality.
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Roman Ondák Loop 2009 Courtesy the artist, gb agency Paris, Galerie Martin Janda Vienna & Johnen Galerie Berlin © Roman Ondák |
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