Vertical Distraction

Things I Forget to Tell Myself, Shelly Silver, us 1988, 2 min.
The Bath House, Henna-Riikka Halonen, uk 2009, 12 min.
544/544 (up/down), Thomas Mohr, nl 2011, 9 min. *
The Experience of Fliehkraft, Till Nowak, de 2011, 3 min. *
The Fire Theft, Isabelle Hayeur, ca 2010, 9 min *Vertical Distraction, Dennis Feser, de 2010, 4 min. *
Transformance, Nina Kurtela, de 2010, 10 min. *
Car Crash, Paul Wong, ca 2010, 4 min.
Buenos Aires Recyclers [or: Berlin Recyclers], Nikki Schuster, de 2011 [2012], 7 [5] min. *
Public Sculpture, Jeremy Bailey, ca/ua 2009, 6 min. *
Das Badezimmer, Bjørn Melhus, de 2011, 5 min. *

* Artists present for Q+A

Human beings have created a world for themselves with their cities – a world in which they appear to be incompatible. In Things I Forget to Tell Myself, fragmentary video observations of a single day in New York City collide with its media myth. The Bath House is based on a Constructivist play by Mayakovsky. 544/544 (up/down) is a cyclical synaesthetic video with music by Hanne Darboven. The Experience of Fliehkraft uses digital manipulation to realise engineers’ unbounded dreams. Property speculation triggered by the Olympic Games and the backlash against it are the themes of The Fire Theft. The artist in Vertical Demonstration performatively adapts himself to the city, while in the 5-month long work Transformance, the artist remains entirely still. Car Crash documents the incompatibility of humans with their deadliest invention: the automobile. In Buenos Aires Recyclers, litter is animated into fantastic new forms of life. An ironic glance is cast towards both the socialist practice of public hero worship and contemporary debates around the subject in Public Sculpture. And finally architecture itself becomes the central protagonist in the trailer to Psycho, and in a variation on it, Das Badezimmer.

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A project by the Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt,with the support of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes