Kopietheater is an experiment in radical cinema and the culmination of a research project by curator and artist Ian White. It explores the ways in which context and the act of reading can become the material content of our experience in the auditorium. In the Kopietheater film, video, still images, sound, text and performance are radically juxtaposed into unique, simultaneous presentations – a theatre of reproducible units proposed as fundamental cinema.
Kopietheater follows a series of exploratory screenings and events in March 2009 under the title (borrowed from the Rosa von Praunheim film) It’s Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Situation In Which He Lives at Kino Arsenal and other venues. The title event from that series is re-presented here: a simultaneous screening of von Praunheim’s film – widely regarded as instigating the gay rights movement in Germany that is as incisive, hysterical and challenging an indictment of homogenized gay culture today as it was when it was made - alongside a series of photographs by the American artist Emily Roysdon; a re-gendered, contemporary version of a series by fellow American David Wojnarowicz (Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-9) to which they also pay homage. Affiliations, conflicts and questions flicker between the two.
The screening is supported by a programme of work specially conceived for the event by artists, writers and theorists all of whom attended the original screenings in March, who were invited to propose two things that we would see, hear or read at the same time as each other for up to five minutes. As such they take the form of responses, critiques and new explorations. A new kind of cinema without a moving image: Kopietheater.
Programme 1
Contributions by: Rosa Barba; Rainer Bellenbaum; Matei Bellu, Madeleine Bernstorff, Emilie Bujes & Guillaume Cailleau; Anne Breimaier; Martin Ebner; Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth; Judith Hopf; Matthew Lutz-Kinoy; Henrik Olesen; Klaus Weber; Florian Zeyfang
ca. 70’
Programme 2
Simultaneous presentation:
untitled (David Wojnarowicz project)
Emily Roysdon, USA 2001-8, digital photographs
Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt / It’s Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Situation In Which He Lives
Rosa von Praunheim, West Germany 1970, 16mm, 67 minutes, color
Followed by: Q&A with Ian White and Rosa von Praunheim in the auditorium and Emily Roysdon live from New York.
Ian White is Adjunct Film Curator for Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. He also works as an independent curator, writer and artist.
Contact: ianwhite.email@googlemail.com
