Phil Collins: Marxism Today (prologue) at BFI

Artist Phil Collins talks about his installation marxism today, at BFI Southbank's Gallery from 3 February - 10 April 2011. The work features Collins' short film marxism today (prologue) (2010), first shown at the 6th Berlin Biennale, and a new companion video, use! value! exchange! (2010), which together explore through archive footage and contemporary interviews what became of Marxist Leninist teachers' expertise after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Collins suggests that Westerners today are lucky, as we have a sense of ownership of our culture, whereas in Berlin, there is a sense of embarrassment as regards the past and subsequently memories of childhood school groups and songs have fallen away. Collins further describes why he has centred his research on the impact that the loss of this heritage has had on the German people.


VIDEO

ruth ewan (damnatio memoriae)

Damnatio Memoriae

installation, slide projection, audio, archival material, 2010

DAMNATIO MEMORIAE (the damnation of memory), refers to a punishment issued by the Roman Senate following a person’s death in an attempt to remove the person in question from cultural memory. Items such as coins, statues, paintings and documents were thought to be destroyed, names erased and property seized. Shown at Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt, Germany, Damnatio Memoriae was made up of a series of interconnected installations, mapping relations between seemingly disparate historic events.

A crop of Russian-Siberian heritage tomatoes, named after American actor and singer Paul Robeson (1898—1976), made up the installation, Them that plants them is soon forgotten. As the tomatoes ripened they were incorporated into the café menu at the Arthur Boskamp Foundation. Included in the installation was archive material relating to Robeson’s political activism and surveillance by both US and UK governments.

A slideshow with narration, The Brank, functioned as a loop of connecting information and backdrop to the works, making links between a scold’s bridle,damnatio memoriae, a missing sculpture of Paul Robeson by artist Antonio Salemme, MK ULTRA, Paul Robeson’s activism, anarchism, Ralph Chaplin, black cats, the European witch-hunts and an obsolete law of England and Wales known as the Common Scold Act.

Other works in the exhibition included a collection of inner record sleeves from Paul Robeson albums, The New Idealism, a giant witch’s hat, a collection of overturned images of witches and Black Cat Cross my Path, I Think Every Day’s Gonna Be My Last, where a local black cat was befriended and fed by gallery staff.

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Akram Zaatari, The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico

The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico from akram zaatari on Vimeo.

Lines of Control

More than forty works of video, prints, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and installation by international artists delve into the past and explore the present to expose the seductive simplicity of drawing lines as a substitute for learning how to live with each other. Living within and across these lines can be a messy, bloody business but also offers a productive space where new nations, identities, languages, and relationships are forged.

At its core, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space investigates the historic upheaval of the 1947 partition of India that spawned the nations of Pakistan and later Bangladesh. The exhibition is part of an ongoing project initiated in 2005 by Green Cardamom, a London-based nonprofit arts organization. Expanding on the significance of partition in South Asia, Lines of Control at the Johnson Museum also addresses physical and psychological borders, trauma, and the reconfiguration of memory in other partitioned areas: North and South Korea, Sudan and South Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Armenia and its diaspora, and questions of indigenous sovereignty in the United States. The exhibition explores the products and remainders of partition and borders characteristic of the modern nation-state, and includes the continued impact of colonization, the physical and psychic violence of displacement, dilemmas of identity and belonging, and questions of commemoration.

Artists represented in the exhibition are Bani Abidi, Francis Alÿs, Sarnath Banerjee, Farida Batool, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Muhanned Cader, Duncan Campbell, Iftikhar Dadi, DAAR, Anita Dube, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Sophie Ernst, Gauri Gill, Shilpa Gupta, Zarina Hashmi, Emily Jacir, Ahsan Jamal, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Amar Kanwar, Noa Lidor, Mario Mabor, Nalini Malani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tom Molloy, Rashid Rana, Raqs Media Collective, Jolene Rickard, Hrair Sarkissian, Seher Shah, Surekha, Hajra Waheed, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Muhammad Zeeshan.

Learned Homeland

1996, installation, public space

A project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler for Neue Galerie, Graz

In Austria, the concept of homeland is implemented not only regionally but also on a supra-regional and state level. This is meant to facilitate and force the citizens’ emotional attachment to the state. This type of manipulation already takes place in the school institution “Learned Homeland”/”Gelernte Heimat” attempts to illustrate these “nativizing strategies” with Austrian school books. The construction of “homeland” is particularly vivid in school books.

In creating collective identities through the concept of homeland, the “own” is always valued against the “other” and in this way demarcated from it. The “own” history is glorified, or even falsified. “Natural beauty” is pulled in for symbolization and concretization of the “Austria homeland” and used to produce a sense of the citizens’ ties to the “homeland.”

Through the early influence of the state school institution on the pupils, equating Austria with homeland is deemed natural. This leads to a situation in which an obviously constructed sense of homeland is seen as a natural fundamental human necessity and is hardly ever questioned.

Poster object at the main square:

Two school book pages expanded with blocks of text and an announcement of the exhibition in the Neue Galerie animated observers to confront the construction of a homeland-concept using their own school experiences. Interviews with passers-by reading the texts on the posters were carried out and recorded on video.

Exhibition in the Neue Galerie:

In the first room of the exhibition, the video documentation of the reactions of those passing by and reading the posters was shown. On display in the next two rooms were twelve Bubblejet prints, which thematized further examples of homeland constitution found in the school textbooks.

Presented in the fourth room was the video “Learned Homeland – Working Talks”/”Gelernte Heimat – Arbeitsgespräche”. This video includes theorists from Austria and Germany who have published texts on racism and homeland.

Interviews were carried out with: Jost Müller, Nora Räthzel, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark Terkessidis, Vera Kockot, Herbert Nikitsch/Bernhard Tschofen and Walter Manoschek.

The conversations expand the content of the theme by pointing out the relationship between homeland and racism in Austria and Germany.

Four Moors (Sardinia) by Melanie Manchot

‘Four Moors Sardinia’ is a video work made in response to an invitation to participate in an interventionist exhibition at the Ministry of Culture in Cagliari, Sardinia. While researching towards this commission, I became aware of the complicated and conflicted nature of a ‘Sardinian sense of identity’. While now autonomous after decades of struggle over its status, the island is far from united, its many dialects as well as the many variations in the design of its flag pointing to this complexity. For my commission, I invited employees from the ministry to sing a traditional Sardinian song to camera, acappella in an impromptu studio set up in one of the ministry’s office rooms. The film presents the four singers in profile in direct reference to the Sardinian flag, which shows four moors’ heads divided by a red cross. The four songs range from a nursery rhyme, a love song, a call to arms and a political song against the tyranny of Sardinia’s oppressors. The work was installed in the lobby of this modernist building as if greeting visitors into the exhibition.

Four Moors (Sardinia) from melanie manchot on Vimeo.

macdermott's war song (project)

Jingo Karaoke
Multimedia Performance
We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do ...
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too!

It was 1878 when in the United States Edison patented the phonograph that later was developed into gramophone and was the most common device for playing recorded sound until the 1980s.
In the same year across the ocean the music-hall singer G. H. Macdermott (aka "the Great Macdermott") introduced in London Pavilion his song By Jingo (means By God in Old English).
This is one of the very first examples of modern propaganda since Macdermott was commissioned to change the public opinion in Britain with a popular song in the middle of the political crisis between the British Empire and Russia, after the war with Turkey in the Balkans and Caucasus.
The crisis ended with a diplomatic triumph of Britain's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and after the song a politician from the opposition Laborist Party invented the term jingoism that now is used for describing "extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy".
It is amazing how political life changed forever since audiovisual mass media and propaganda charged pop culture were invented and eventually became an intrinsic part of the public life. In 2008 exactly one hundred and thirty years after, we can celebrate an anniversary of audiovisual industry and jingoism, with Russia becoming again the world's Evil, with the US presidential campaign in which a remote war that can be seen as a perfect example of jingoism was described as "God's Plan" and the Blue Ray (probably the last hard copy media) becoming world standard.
To remind for all these events media artist Petko Dourmana invited in his Chain Reaction Pavilion everybody who wanted to sing Macdermott's war song By Jingo with a karaoke set that uses a New Edison-Style Cup Phonograph.
In the plastic cups used as recording media visitors got free beer after singing.
By Jingo Karaoke performance was presented from September 11-14th, 2008 at Macedonia Square in Skopje, Macedonia as part of Upgrade International

jayce salloum at canadian cultural centre, paris

Tom Leonard on Language and social status

TEDxRamallah: Munir Fasheh-Occupation of Knowledge

The worst conquest is that of knowledge. It led to conquering diversity and pluralism in living by a modern superstition: the belief in a single universal path for knowing, learning, and progressing. Transforming ahaali (no synonym in English; the closest is 'people-in-community') into citizens has been instrumental in the conquest and disastrous to human communities. Whereas the basic relationship in the case of citizens is to a state and institutions, it is in the case of ahaali to one another, to a place, culture, and collective memory. Knowledge, learning, and religion of ahaali have been gradually replaced by institutional ones. Examples from Palestine and what happened in Cairo...

Wenn Ich Ens Nit Mih Existiere (cultural identity)

Wenn ich ens nit mih existiere,
wenn ich die Auge zojedonn.
Wenn ich mich bovve präsentiere,
janz hoch am Himmelspöötzje stonn.
Dann soll d'r Petrus dat schon maache,
hä sök d'r schönste Platz mir us.
Hä weiß et jitt dann jet ze laache:
ich bin en Kölle am Ring zehus

When I am gone

When I close my eyes.

When I present myself at heaven's gates

St Peter will find for me the holiest place.

Don't laugh at me, it's true

Because I was from Cologne.

There is a Happy Land

There is a happy land down in duke street jail,

Where all the prisoners stand hangin fae a nail,

Ham and eggs you never see,

Dirty water for your tea.

There you live and there you dee,

God save the Queen.

Then the corporation came wae a great new plan,

build multi-storey flats on the happy land,

Now there's rows a hooses there,

Mind you step gon up the stair,

Ghosts'll come and pull your hair,

God save the Queen.

Alan Currall: Encyclopaedia

Two years before Wikipedia re-defined the nature of the encyclopaedic work of reference, transforming it from a compendium of expert views into a repository of collective wisdom, Alan Currall produced this endearingly quixotic People’s Almanac, assembled from ordinary people’s individual contributions. The people in question are recruited from Currall’s immediate circle of family and friends, and the answers they give offer a disarmingly local, if palpably limited and partial, perspective on the attempted elucidation of a diverse range of subjects (aspidistra, air, Abyssinia etc). Persistently confronted by their doubts and failings, displaying a tendency to falter or digress, the participants’ definitions highlight the inherent absurdity of universalising schemes of classification, and undercut the overweening will-to-order that sustains the pursuit of systematic knowledge.

Released as a CD-Rom (a format as passé as a morocco-bound multi-volume edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), the piece’s homemade graphic style exhibits a deliberately earnest retro quality (that felt oddly antiquated even at the time). Commissioned in conjunction with Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent (Currall’s home town), ‘Encyclopaedia’ draws on his roots in this now relatively unsung, and increasingly marginalised part of Middle England to project an engaging, inclusive sense of commonality, in which the so-called ‘common people’ demonstrate the virtues, and the limits, of what passes for common knowledge.

A Film and Video Umbrella Touring Exhibition. Curated and produced by Film and Video Umbrella, Stills and Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

Supported by the National Touring Programme of the Arts Council of England.

'Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?' Ruth Ewan w/ Artangel (over 100 buskers in London who played 'The Ballad of Accounting' for a week)

Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
"Give me the making of the songs of the nation, and I care not who makes its laws".
Andrew Fletcher, 1703
"Music is doing something to everyone who hears it all the time".
Arnold Perris, Music as Propaganda, 1984


Ewan MacColl wrote Ballad of Accounting in 1964.The lyrics follow a simple structure, considered to be unique among his three hundred compositions. The song offers criticism as self-reflection, repeatedly posing provocative and direct questions:
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Government records released in 2006 through The National Archive show that from 1932, security service MI5 held a file on MacColl. One report claims that he was ‘a communist with very extreme views’ who needed ‘special attention’. The file also states, as a cause for concern, that MacColl had ‘exceptional ability as a singer and musical organiser’.
Ruth Ewan's Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? involves the co-ordination of over one hundred buskers around London. Performing both under and above ground, the buskers incorporate Ballad of Accounting into their usual repertoire. Their individual acts share a collective purpose. The week-long series of performances slips quietly into the rush-hour routine, as the scattered recitals filter into the subconscious of those passing by.
Busking is about something other than just being an able musician or a street entertainer; it is a raw performance, an autonomous act.
Legislation has almost eradicated busking; by-laws and policing keep all but the hardiest musicians from the streets, while others pursue bureaucratic routes into designated areas. The recent introduction of music licensing has restrained the natural spontaneity of performances across a range of live venues.
The entirety of Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? cannot be experienced by any one person. We may or may not be aware of the song’s fleeting presence in the city: a bold brass section as we cross the Thames or a quiet voice accompanied by a guitar as we turn off the main street.

Protest Songbook A project by Big Hope: Miklós Erhardt & Dominic Hislop | Radio Broadcast

CLICK HERE

My Father is a Certain Kind of Man, December 2010 (Israel)

My father is a certain kind of man.

A few years ago we were in Greece together. He sat on a bench with another man. And they understood each other.

Their Language was their cigarettes,

Their ears grown large with age,

Their noses red from good times and bad times,

What a life we’ve had

Their hands ingrained with dirt from long ago

My father’s a certain kind of man.

And I sometimes wish I was too

(accompanying music: Mrs McGrath: The Sergeant Said)

marxism today: Phil Collins

marxism today

Phil Collins

Phil Collins’ work in film, video and photography often provides a platform for the overlooked or the disenfranchised. Shining a light on what is generally perceived as the losing side in the political and social upheavals of the past two decades, ‘marxism today’ is an ongoing project that began by following the fortunes of former teachers of Marxism-Leninism in Communist East Germany. Collins’ short film ‘marxism today (prologue)’ (2010) mixes contemporary interviews with the ex-teachers alongside archive material, to form the centrepiece of this exhibition, which also includes a new video in which a number of concepts central to Marxist economic analysis are introduced to a new generation of students. Relocating from the start of this school year to Manchester, where Engels wrote ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, Collins’ project prompts a wider reflection on the city’s formative place in the history of radical thinking. Initiating a series of interactions with nearby schools and the local public, it also enquires into the continuing relevance of Marxist ideas in the present day.

‘marxism today’ is co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Cornerhouse, Abandon Normal Devices, Berliner Künstlerprogramm/DAAD, Berlin Biennale and Shady Lane Productions.

SEEKING FORMER
TEACHERS OF
MARXISM

Did you teach Marxist-Leninist philosophy at school or university before 1989?

How did your life and career change as a result of perestroika?

Did you have to give up your profession forever?

Find a new subject to teach?

Or find a new career?

Documentary filmmaker Phil Collins is looking for people willing to share their story.

Get in touch with us by email
info@shadylaneproductions.co.uk

Or leave your name and contact information HERE.

Confidentiality guaranteed.

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