Monday May 14, 7:30pm
What You Imagined It To Be
Organized by Caspar Stracke
w/ works by: Jaimi Aleksos, Belgavox, Gerd Conradt, Cinema Contraimagen, Brian Doyle, Felix Gmelin, Jill Godmillow, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Isidore Isou, Christian Jankowski, Daniel Kötter and Constanze Fischbeck, Kini Matini, Simon Payne, Caspar Stracke, Billy Talen and Youandfilms, Terre Thaemlitz, Sisters Uncut, Claudia von Alemann, Florian Zeyfang
Still from “Four Reenactments” (2018) by Caspar Stracke – Image courtesy of the artist
“We can’t stay sitting down at a film festival. We have to do something, here too”.
– Harun Farocki
Microscope is pleased to welcome artist and curator Caspar Stracke to the gallery for a special program he assembled on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the May ’68 revolts in France and Europe, loosely centered around protest culture in cinema theaters and tracing the ways in which rebellion in the cinema reflected the political climate.
Projected onto a large canvas resembling a protest sign, the video program is inspired by the New Year’s Eve 1968 occupation of a movie theater at the legendary Exprmntl festival of Knokke-le-Zoute in Belgium. Among the students who interfered with and introduced performative elements into the usual screening routine were Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, Gerd Conradt, and Oimel Mai.
The program includes three videos by Stracke made between 2001 and 2018 – one in collaboration with Terre Thaemlitz – that respond to the event and related subjects. In his latest work “Four Re-enactments” the artist re-enacts 4 scenes of the Belgium protest. Other recent works in the program by Jaimi Aleksos, Kini Matini, Sisters Uncut, Brian Doyle, Billy Talen and Youandfilms, among others, continue the themes of protest, cinematic intervention, and re-enactment.
Stracke also includes excerpts from film documentations of the Knokke-le-Zoute festival in addition to works by Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Jill Godmillow, Gerd Conradt, and others.
From Caspar Stracke:
“Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the ’68 movement, it [the program] is a focused on the collision between the notions of cinema and protest culture, taking a historically significant event of 1968 as a starting point. The latter could be described as the Underground Filmmakers’ own ’68 ignition, but at the same time also solidifying a schism between politically motivated filmmaking and Avant Garde Cinema.
During the height of the Vietnam War and at the formation of the international student movement, the event took place in a casino in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, the venue of the Exprmntl 4 Film Festival. A cinema hall got occupied by some of its own audience, including participating filmmakers. Some screenings were disrupted (or, inevitably, “expanded”) by means of performative actions, banners and vocal interventions.
Four scenes of this event I decided to re-enact, inspired by the prevalent question of how such political actions would come into place today and if one can effectively negotiate between the duality of physical and virtual social spaces.
I curated a series of works (dominantly work excerpts) that align with this inquiry and included my own responses to these works […] The re-enactment theme wriggles throughout the program, I included other artists’ re-enactments and ultimately my own remake of a scene describing the remake of a 1968 protest film.
The result can be seen as a hybrid between curatorial work, found footage cinema and appropriation art.”
General admission $8
Members or students w/ ID $6
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Caspar Stracke is a filmmaker, visual artist and curator living and working in New York City (since 1993) and Berlin (since 2017). In his films and installation work he investigates socio-political and aesthetic potentialities in life surroundings – architecture, urbanism and media culture. He is also interested in the poetics, ephemerality and time-based mechanisms of cinema itself. Stracke’s films and installation work have been shown in numerous exhibitions in venues such as Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, MoMA PS1, Yerba Buena Art Center, Hammer Museum, ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), ICC Tokyo (Japan), Museo Tamayo, Mexico. He has also participated in festivals such as CPH:DOX, Transmediale, Oberhausen, EMAF, Ann Arbor, Transitio, Microwave and many others throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Stracke was the recipient of a Rockefeller Media Art fellowship for the film project “time/OUT OF JOINT” (which he completed 2016). From 2005-2013 he co-directed with Gabriela Monroy video_dumbo, an annual international festival for contemporary moving image in NYC. In 2014 they also co-curated the 60th Flaherty Film Seminar in Colgate, New York under the title “Turning the Inside Out”. A selection of the latter was also screened at MoMA New York, Cine Tonala, Mexico and WHS, Helsinki, Finland. From 2012 – 2017 he was the professor for Contemporary Art and Moving Image at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, in Helsinki. Caspar Stracke is the editor of “Godard – Boomerang” a 2014 Godard mini symposium in Helsinki and a forthcoming publication at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, Summer 2018.
Program:
FOUR RE-ENACTMENTS
by Caspar Stracke, Germany, 2018, 4 minutes
PARIS RIOTS 2016
by Jaimi Aleksos, France, 2016
GREEK RIOTS ERUPT IN ATHENS
by Kini Matini, Greece/Spain, 2016
AND HOW GODMILLOW EXPANDED IT
by Caspar Stracke, Helsinki, 2015, 4 minutes 43 seconds
DEAD WOMAN CAN’T VOTE
by Sisters Uncut, UK, 2015, 1 minutes 10 seconds
BOWLING FOR SCHAUBURG
by Brian Doyle, US, 2003, 2 minutes
REV BILLY EXORCIZES BP
by Billy Talen and Youandfilms, UK, 2011, 6 minutes 51 seconds
BETWEEN SYMPATHY AND EMPATHY IS TIME
by Caspar Stracke and Terre Thaemlitz, US, 2001, 4 minutes 50 seconds
and excerpts from:
EXPRMNTL KNOKKE
by Claudia von Alemann, Germany,1968
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM COMPETITION
by Belgavox, Belgium, 1968
TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ
by Isidore Isou, France, 1951, 3 minutes 29 seconds
BOICOTT AL FESTIVAL DE CANNES
by Cinema Contraimagen, France, 1968, 2 minutes 36 seconds
RAWFILM (ROHFILM)
by W+B Hein, Germany, 1968, 5 minutes 30 seconds
SPLICEFILM
by Florian Zeyfang, Germany, 2013, 4 minutes
WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT
by Jill Godmillow, US, 1998, 5 minutes
FARBTEST – DIE ROTE FAHNE
by Gerd Conradt, Germany, 1968, 4 minutes 34 seconds
FARBTEST – DIE ROTE FAHNE II
by Felix Gmelin, Sweden, 2002, 2 minutes 25 seconds
STATE THEATER #2 THERAN
by Daniel Kötter and Constanze Fischbeck, Germany, 2010, 2 minutes 25 seconds
THE HOLY ARTWORK
by Christian Jankowski, US, 2009, 4 minutes 5 seconds
NOT AND OR
by Simon Payne, UK, 2010, 4 minutes
Still from “Between Sympathy and Empathy is Time” (2001) by Caspar Stracke and Terre Thaemlitz – Image courtesy of the artists
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2018 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
