margarethe kollmer

"unprotected data becomes cyber-porn drama"

 'The Thing Is' is a semi-fictional 3d animation that combines transferred images of internet porn with blog post text fragments that ask for guidance. Surreal effects occur due to the translation of material, renegotiating boundaries of bodies and distinct meanings. Additional imagery is taken from public parks, representing public space in its physical form. With the anthropomorphic figures remaining completely motionless, the camera is the only actor. In this way the work investigates questions of agency and objectification in a hyper-surveilled environment.

'The Thing Is’ comprises a 30 min film version that creates a coherent narration from the material, a series of autonomous clips that can be shown separately and 3D prints of the figures in the animation. 

the thing is

dorine van meel

In Phoenix’s Last Song the viewer is presented with the legend of the paradisaical bird who descends to earth in order to die. Whilst the sun sets fire to the pyre of twigs on which she lays, the phoenix sings a song to the child that will be born from her ashes. Her words are a call to think and live against the patriarchal, capitalist and colonial power structures that define the world as we know it. The text draws on the work of feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir en Emma Goldman, who each look at the ways in which institutions like the bourgeois family, state education, the legal apparatus inscribe the child within these power structures. Against this background, Phoenix’s Last Song opens up a space to imagine how a new world may arise out of a burning of the old.

Original Music by Sami El-Enany    
Voice-over by Emma Bennett

Phoenix's Last Song

"oh yes, i will practice my canon proudly, a golden image of stark blue skies, of dams and dykes and waterworks, masters and guilds, and how they transformed into dedicated directors, offshore engineers, shiny-looking cars on lease claim our streets with logos of well-designed brands stuck to their windows – one empty baby seat in the back."

the video "beyond the nation state i want to dream" deals with the construct of nation states and national identity in europe, examining the binaries and mechanisms of exclusion at work in the constitution of a ‘we’. consisting entirely of slowly decomposing and recomposing computer-generated images, the video juxtaposes apparently innocuous representations of national identity with sites on which the intersection of nationhood, colonialism and imperial conquest have been made manifest. these sites range from fort elmina, the first european settlement in west africa, to the room in which the 1884 berlin conference took place. such imagery is accompanied by a dream-like monologue in which a narrator attempts in vain to escape from a present in which the historical violence of the nation state is perpetuate in the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

music and sounds for the video are produced and performed by jesse osborne-lanthier and olle holmberg, with a voice-over by therese ladegaard henningsen.

beyond the nation state i want to dream

Perfume Area

Serpentine and Tam Dao are the names of two fragrances made by Comme des Garçons and Diptyque, respectively. They were reviewed by Perfume Area (Sydney Shen & Laurel Schwulst) in 2015.

In each video, Damon Zucconi’s voice reads aloud a perfume review. The voice is synthetic and has no texture, but is instead composed of phonemes that are pure sine waves.

By Laurel Schwulst, Sydney Shen, and Damon Zucconi, 2016 

serpentine + tam dao

"as the camera moves through a hazy field of colours in which a physical reality is yet to crystallise, a semi-transparent sheet flows majestically across the frame as if caught in a gust of wind. perhaps aspirations for a better future may be transient, but nonetheless they must fly" (thomas cuckle)

music and sounds produced and performed by.  
jesse osborne-lanthier and olle holmberg.  
installation photos by tim bowditch

disobedient children

habib william kherbek

Retrodiction is a collection of video poems created in dialogue with the urban geography of Berlin. Over the course of three months, Kherbek collected images of found, or, to use Kherbek's term, "second-hand", language that he encountered in the city and then wrote poems using the found language as titles for the works.

The 45 works that constitute Retrodiction extend ideas developed in two earlier projects, Ephemera (2014), a video collection of 45 poems posted to Youtube featuring the writer reading original works composed over 45 days in London, and Are You Free from Sin? (2015), a "second-hand language" project involving words Kherbek found while living in New York City which he subsequently arranged into a poem and live-posted on Instagram. The poems of Retrodiction exist in literary, sonic and visual dimensions, engaging technologies of distribution and mediation as much as language itself.

with special thanks to William Glucroft 