Oct 12, 4 to 8 pm
Opening
Films, short lectures and discussion
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Andreas Fogarasi (A)Public Brands—Deutsche Städte (German Cities)2005 | DVD | 8 min
As a supplement to his permanently installed work in the foyer of Lakeside building B01, the artist shows a filmed version of his analysis of urban image production as characterized by the primacy of the corporate aesthetic.
Public Brands—German Cities shows the logos of over 120 cities, and reveals the various strategies, stages and backgrounds behind present-day city marketing. The logos are arranged alphabetically and reduced to black & white (without gray scale), which prompts a focus on their iconography and “tests” their graphic incisiveness in the absence of color—an important demand placed on a “functioning” logo, which also provokes questions on the mechanisms and meaning of this “function.” (A.F.)
Peter Spillmann (CH)
Talking Absolute Business
1998 | video | 20 min
The video Talking Absolute Business is compiled out of footage from various business and news channels. On several levels, the relevant images and a never-ending discourse are used to show how the financial market tries to
earn credibility by means of (media) representation and how much the idea of profitable capital is also a question of current trends and momentarily accepted doctrine.
Using the example of the Eastern Europe Fund of the Vontobel Bank, it also becomes evident that private and institutional capital investments are tied up with political influence over countries and regions which are treated as emerging markets, and that, to a great extent, the vehement promotion of the financial market in the wake of globalization is shaped by the old familiar colonialist and nationalist motives. (P.S.)
Anette Baldauf, Dorit Margreiter (A)
The She Zone
2004 | video | 15 min
Short Lecture
While there is overall agreement that the current formation of globalization ruled by the credo of neo-liberalism is seriously undermining the nation state and its decision-making ability as much as it is polarizing social and economic landscapes around the globe, the mappings rarely address questions of gender, sexuality and the body. Searching for gender topographies of global spaces, The She Zone relies on the popular format of a narrated slide show to reflect on gendered spaces, globalization and othering. This videotaped slide show documents a venture into a women’s only shopping space—the so-called She Zone in Abu Dhabi—, which discovers that it has closed a few days earlier due to lack of interest. Global consumer forces, the documentation suggests, are stronger than the need for women’s segregation. (A.B./D.M.)
Gülsün Karamustafa (TR)
Stairway
2001 | video | 8 min
Suitcase Trade
1998– 2001 | video | 7 min
Gülsün Karamustafa has occupied herself for years with various forms of informal economy, usually from the perspective of Istanbul and the changes the city has gone through since the decline of the adjacent socialist states. Istanbul became the destination for various migrations, opening up new fields of work and new trade routes. In Stairway, Karamustafa shows a group of Rumanian children playing street music in front of an historical stairway. With minimal formal means, accompanied by the melancholy strains of Roma music, the artist draws our attention to the officially regulated, but always circumvented residence rights of these mini-guest workers.
Suitcase Trade refers to the many women from the post-Soviet republics who peddle “worthless” objects, but also sell their own bodies, as they commute back and forth between the Turkish mega-city and the villages of their homeland. The video documents several of the artist’s installations, in which she tried to apply the rules of the art market to the “suitcase trade.”
Josef Dabernig (A)
WARS
2001 | 16mm on DVD | b/w | 10 min
Director, screenwriter, editor, sound and production: Josef Dabernig
DOP: Christian Giesser
Cast: Josef Dabernig, Ingeburg Wurzer, Otto Zitko
Business is at a standstill in the dining car of a long-distance train. The waiters, waitresses and cook bide their time, conveying the indifferent lethargy of exhaustion and a the lack of anything to do. They lounge around in their bright uniforms like a ship’s crew in the hot sunshine; non-communicative as they are, they are hardly more than part of the furniture. Their uniforms and the appointments of the train car—as a symbiosis of modernist clarity with a hint of folkloric accents—contrast with an exotic potpourri of chips, nuts, chewing gum and beverages appealingly presented. Every action seems passive, conditioned by the train car, the state of the tracks, the route, the ambient climate, etc. And yet, one person seems to be taking care of some important written work! Balance sheets of sales are typed into a calculator. Otherwise, there’s only sitting and waiting amidst wafts of smoke, while the landscape rushes by on fast forward behind the curtains. Finally, some life comes into the car: not customers—no—but the cleaning equipment is fetched, and mops and buckets are made ready. The trip seems to be coming to an end—how else to explain the excessive mopping and polishing into which the three now plunge themselves, first standing, then on their knees and under the tables. (J.D.)
Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann (D)
discuss the mappability of the global economy
with Philippe Rekacewicz (F) from Le Monde Diplomatique
Artists Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann have created for Lakeside a large wall panel on the theme of Monopoly-Like Productions in various areas of the economy. Based on their own engagement with questions of how to visualize economic relationships, they will speak with the geographer and cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz, whose maps have become a hallmark of the French monthly magazine Le Monde Diplomatique. How might one conceive of the relations between abstract elements (lines, colors, symbols, patterns) and real circumstances which impinge on the worlds in which individuals are living? Is cartography trapped in the (apparent) objectivity of statistics, or can it be understood as a means for making a political statement? Are maps merely data converted into graphic form, or should the problems of obtaining and selecting information (which, for example, might tell us something about globalization, as well as the possible involvement of the draftsperson) be regarded as part of the cartographic act and find an echo in his/her products?