Program 6

Short film program consisting of:

Total running time approx. 61 min.

Zwischenwelt

In 1986 the Muhammad Iqbal Monument was erected in Munich, commemorating the poet, philosopher, and mentor of the independent postcolonial state of Pakistan. Iqbal, who completed his doctorate in Munich in 1907, lived in Bavaria for many years and died in Pakistan in 1938.
In 1962 Gani Bilir arrived in Kiel as a so-called Gastarbeiter. His payslips, which are visible in the film, are discovered by the filmmaker in the family archive. They are a document of the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers and their lack of recognition as humans in Germany.
A variety of places, moments, and snatches of historical memory are woven in the film into a particular decolonial view of our time. The telling of history and the politics of memory in Germany are oriented to a white dominant society. The longings, experiences, or struggles of Black people, People of Color, Indigenous people, and migrants are marginalized. Three sisters, Saboura, Basira, and Kirat, gather at historically significant sites in Bavarian history. They approach these stories with their own biographies and the sculptures by the artist Ahu Dural. As poets, the children of migrant workers, thinkers they stand for the many stories of resistance and biographies of the in-between world.

Exhibition

A collection of images reproduced from films, museums, and archives, EXHIBITION weaves together multiple biographies and texts to construct a single imaginary subject. Eija-Riitta Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer marries the Berlin Wall and turns her home into a museum of architectural miniatures to abate her longing for those objects. Mary Richardson stabs Diego Velázquez’s “The Toilet of Venus” as an act of protest and dedication to an imprisoned suffragette. Shifting into first person point-of-view, the narration combines quotations from the painter Agnes Martin, early eye tracking studies, Sigmund Freud’s case history of “Rat Man,” and an account of a Klein bottle’s misuse as a candlestick holder. The film fragments, copies, and excerpts to create a portrait of desire and trespass, becoming a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood. “I’m not a woman. I’m a doorknob.”

Conspiracy

An incantation of multiple architectures of the self for Black women, CONSPIRACY is a film by artists Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. This tribute to the manual labors of creation, which closes with a gesture of contained Black feminist arson, forms a contact zone between their respective practices of sculpture and filmmaking. The wandering hypnosis of Hunt-Ehrlich’s gorgeous black and white cinematography ritualizes the assertive elegance of Leigh’s craftsmanship of clay and stone. This shared composition is directed by a mesmerizing attentiveness to the haptics of sculptural labor.
Hunt-Ehrlich and Leigh’s film performs an enchanting re-citation of HANDS OF INGE (1962), a 16mm black-and-white documentary about the artist Ruth Inge Hardison. An actor and photographer, Hardison was most dedicated to her practice as a sculptor. As one of few Black women recognized in this capacity, there is a line of inheritance between her and Leigh’s defiant positionalities within the white norms of the art world. These nested references to cultural caretaking and artistic ingenuity are heightened by Lorraine O’Grady’s presence in the film.
Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich have had a decade-long creative friendship, which makes this film an extension of an ongoing conversation that both also share with a larger constellation of Black women cultural workers. (Yasmina Price)