Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre), 2007

Akram Zaatari, The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico

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

walid raad, lecture, Beirut 2005

Call the Witness - Migration

MIGRATION from Milutin Jovanovic on Vimeo.

Call the Witness - Migration

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

Hito Steyerl on Minorities

'Minorities are not primarily defined by their small number, but by their incompatibility with pre-existing categories of identity' from the Empty Center translated by John Southard

la memoire dure (memory resists)- Rossella Ragazzi

Ibrahim lived with his uncle in the woods in Mali, for a few days he attended Koran school. Alpha comes from Liberia, and during the war his family was dispersed. Nawel lived in Algeria where his large family was forced to have him adopted and taken to France. All these children attended the same preparation class for learning French in a compulsory school in Paris that is aimed at inserting them as soon as possible in normal primary school classes. For 9 months, the film director filmed these children, showing how they were received in France and the relationship established between teachers and pupils. The children learn not only the language but also the values of their host society.

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.

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

CLICK HERE

ICA Boston: exhibition

http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/acting-out/

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.

Muslala: Chiara's Stairs, Matan Israeli

link

Camille-God is Sound

new piece ‘God is Sound’ comprising chants from different religious traditions: Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Jewish, Shinto, Hindu, and including Bach’s Infinite Canon

NB. benjamin britten

Susan Philipsz

Commissioned by GI, Susan Philipsz presented a site-specific outdoor sound work combining three versions of the same song, ‘Lowlands’, as sung by the artist, and offering an extra-ordinary connection with this hidden and little used space.

Requiem for Detroit

Claire Bishop

Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop

'aesthetic is being sacrificed on the altar of social change.'

http://clairebishopresearch.blogspot.com/

Rogue Radio

Research and Resources on
Micro Radio/Low Power FM

see also: Testuo Kogawa

Down at the Bamboo Club

Down at the Bamboo Club
2008 - 2009

Down at the Bamboo Club project explores legacy through participation, historic sites and events with 3 commissions, an exhibition and a publication.

Down at The Bamboo Club: Film, participation and re-enactment was developed by Picture This as a response to national and city wide projects marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery act.

Picture This was keen to develop participatory projects involving re-enactment through workshops and community events. Re-enactments offer sensitive ways to link to diverse communities and gain newly produced material. Re-enactment is a means of expression that has sympathies with oral traditions of storytelling. It has the potential to reconcile the dynamics of contemporary and historical perspectives of slavery and to respond to the specific site, place and context of Bristol.

Through a period of research and development Picture This invited artist Harold Offeh to start conversations with three organisations in the city with links to sites and moments in the city's history of slavery, abolitionism and community relationships - The Georgian House, Wesley's New Room and the Bristol Black Archives Partnership.

These conversations developed into a brief to three commissioned artists (Barby Asante, Mandy McIntosh and Mark Wilsher) to produce new film and video works with communities and partner sites.

Following the commissions Picture This curated an exhibition bringing together the three new works with existing film and video pieces which share ideas of legacy, re-enactment and community.

blog

The Use of Money
by Mark Wilsher

Bamboo Memories
by Barby Asante

STAN DOUGLAS: Television spots/Monodramas

TELEVISION SPOTS (1987/88)
In 1989, his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers.


MONODRAMAS (1991)
Douglas's "Monodramas," ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television's editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding. When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption. -- Nancy Spector