The 11th Forum Expanded presents films and video works in the exhibition spaces and auditorium of the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg and at Arsenal on Potsdamer Platz. The Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Canadian Embassy and the silent green Kulturquartier will each house a video installation. In her installation MLEETA,Sandra Schäfer turns to southern Lebanon and its geopolitical situation and narratives: In the mountain top village of Mleeta, a former Hezbollah base, is the Tourist Landmark of the Resistance, a theme park/propaganda center that glorifies Hezbollah's conflict with Israel. In TERRA NULLIUS OR: HOW TO BE A NATIONALIST, James T. Hong tries to set foot on an island group in the East China Sea (known in Japan as the Senkaku islands and in China as the Diaoyu), which are the object of a dispute between Japan, China and Taiwan. The dispute is played out mainly through sclerotic nationalist gestures. Angela Melitopoulos is also interested in this region. In her installation THE REFRAIN, she examines the function of the refrain as a demarcation of territory through protest song. The post-war history of Okinawa and the South Korean island of Jeju led to the establishment of a staunch peace movement along the axis between US Army bases in the East China Sea. In Deborah Stratman's 16 mm film THE ILLINOIS PARABLES, 11parables set in the Midwest bring home to us the fact that society is shaped by worldview and ideology by depicting the form of a state whose stories become allegories. Fantasies: In Omer Fast's film CONTINUITY,two German parents play out an Afghanistan fantasy in grief for their lost son. In MODERATION, which is set in Egypt, Greece and Italy, Anja Kirschner tells the story of a director's attempt to shoot a horror film. Clemens von Wedemeyer and Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind do not only employ the genre of science-fiction to describe the present, but also so that future archeologists can re-invent the past. We are pleased to present a restoration by the Austrian Film Museum: FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF… by Robert Beavers (1971/90) is a moving document of his filmic production processes. Film prints and video tapes that were re-discovered, thought lost, suffered degradation or were never actually completed are the subject of a series of events that includes works from Nigeria, Afghanistan, Jordan, Cyprus and Indonesia. As a continuation of the "Visionary Archive" project presented in 2015, the question here is once again how in encounters with archives history is projected into the future. 11. Forum Expanded: Heba Amin, Kader Attia, Robert Beavers, Andreas Bunte, Filipa César, Didi Cheeka, Yin-Ju Chen, Liu Chuang, Mike Crane, Helmut Draxler, Melissa Dullius/Gustavo Jahn, Edwin, Haytham El-Wardany, Heinz Emigholz, Omer Fast, Mariam Ghani, Ahmad Ghossein, Raphaël Grisey, Assaf Gruber, Marwan Hamdan, Claudrena N. Harold/Kevin Jerome Everson, James T. Hong, Islam Kamal, Anja Kirschner, Nihad Kreševljakovič, Mark Lewis, Jen Liu, Marie Losier, Guy Maddin/Evan Johnson/Galen Johnson, Lyusya Matveeva, Angela Melitopoulos (with Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela Anderson und Aya Hanabusa), Naeem Mohaiemen, Akihiko Morishita, Pushpamala N., Maged Nader, Ayman Nahle, Joe Namy, Hila Peleg, -Steve Reinke, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Gabraz Sanna, Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind, Volker Sattel, Sandra Schäfer, Kerstin Schroedinger, Shelly Silver, Deborah Stratman, Mika Taanila, Constantinos Taliotis, Clarissa Thieme, Wu Tsang, Anton Vidokle, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Eyal Weizman, Joyce Wieland, Ala Younis, Mayye Zayed and members of the Network of Arab Arthouse Screens (NAAS). Curated by Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (head), Anselm Franke, Nanna Heidenreich, Bettina Steinbrügge and Ulrich Ziemons.
11th Forum Expanded
An architect is commissioned by Hezbollah to populate a remote district with monuments. An artist whose sculptures exploded or disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1980s. A magician who awakens childhood dreams and disappears animals and people, perhaps then himself. Illusion and superstition form collective imaginary worlds In his film AL MARHALA AL RABIAA (The Fourth Stage) and lecture performance "When the Ventriloquist Came and Spoke to Me", Ahmad Ghossein travels to southern Lebanon which has not been the same since the 2006 war. He crosses the country of his childhood, comprised of fantasies, myths and consumer worlds, to explore the monuments that suddenly command the landscape. Production emerges from exploration: "The Fourth Stage" is the state of hypnosis which, by leading the patient back to childhood, is supposed to help find healing approaches for psychological illness. This is what the ventriloquist whom he admired as a child explains to him.
The theme of this year's Forum Expanded is "Traversing the Phantasm". The program sees experimental and artistic film as a form of traversing real and imaginary territories that are manifested both in (geo-)political realities and the fantastical constructs that are symptomatic of capitalist consumer societies. The question also arises here as to what changes this type of traversing can and must trigger within us: what traces can be left behind by an art or film event? Following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the concept of the phantasm is reflected in numerous ways, including in the sense of "working through" archives, social and political themes or collective fantasies. We are glad that the art critic Helmut Draxler will give a keynote lecture on the theme.
