Video Program
Guided Economics
Satellite Stories
Indoctrination, Harun Farocki, Germany 1987, 44 min.
Guided Tour, René Frölke, Germany 2011, 37 min.
The advent of commercial television in Germany in 1984, and the ensuing paradigm shift away from a mandate for quality and education towards one of quotas and profit, was also – in hindsight at least – one of the motives for the founding of VideoFest. Video art was seen at the time essentially as a deconstruction of the new flood of glaringly colourful commercial imagery. The privatisation of television was, however, only part of a larger social reconstruction, which has come to be known as neo-liberalisation; it was not enough that financial capital was "freed from its shackles" through changes in regulations: people's attitudes also needed to adapt to the new system. Through an agonisingly slow piece of observation, Die Schulung [Indoctrination] (VideoFilmFest ’88) reveals in detail how this difficult process plays out. By 2008, the reconstruction of society had long since been completed; neo-liberalism was sliding into its first big crisis and a banker was federal president: Die Führung [Guided Tour] documents his visit in this capacity to an art college.
A project by the Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt,with the support of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes