Forum Expanded Panels

Cairo: the City, the Images, the Archive

Archives are the memory of culture. As part of the Living Archive project this panel discusses the special situation of moving image archives in Cairo. It will focus on accessibility under dictatorship as well as on post-revolution conditions, the relation of analogue and digital, legal and illegal archives and their role in filmic, curatorial and political praxis.
Panelists: Khalid Abdalla, Hala Galal, Maha Maamoun, Sarah Rifki
Moderation: Marcel Schwierin
Saturday, 11.02., 15:00, Veranstaltungsraum, Filmhaus 4th floor

with the kind support of Goethe-Institute Cairo

Programming the Archive

Both the Forum and Forum Expanded strive to make their new discoveries accessible even after the festival, resulting in a unique collection of films at the Arsenal–Institute for Film and Video Art. Starting in 2011, over 30 scholars, curators, artists, and filmmakers have been working on the films they found in this archive, developing new projects from them. The goal has been to create a present in order to understand history and project it into the future. The boundary between festival and archival politics is fluid–and will be discussed among festival organizers, filmmakers, participants, and scholars.
Panelists: Ellen Blumenstein, Vinzenz Hediger, Angela Melitopoulos (Lectures and Performances), Constanze Ruhm (Lectures and Performances), Christoph Terhechte, Entuziazm and participants of the project Living Archive.
Moderation: Stefanie Schulte Strathaus
Sunday, 12.02., 15:00, Veranstaltungsraum, Filmhaus 4th floor

Working the Crisis

This panel discusses different artistic and political responses to the global crisis of capitalism. How do artists address this crisis, and what are the counter-narratives offered to mass media representations? What history is invoked through different critical vocabularies? In what ways can artists intervene in the imaginary produced by the rhetorics of crisis? The artists and filmmakers on this panel each represent a different form of engagement with socio-political questions, in whose works historical genealogies and the possibility of their narration play a central role.
Panelists: Duncan Campbell (Exhibitions), Anjalika Sagar (Exhibitions), Minze Tummescheit (Forum Special Screenings)
Moderation: Stephan Geene
Thursday, 16.02., 14:00, Arsenal 2

Written by: the Artist

In recent years visual artists working in film and video have increasingly focussed on storytelling and narrative as a means of examining history. This approach opens up different trajectories and points of access to film history and cinematic aesthetics, related much more closely to narrative feature filmmaking than to avantgarde and experimental cinema. Artists like Deimantas Narkevičius bring this aesthetic, which is very much connected to the ‚classical’ cinema experience – storytelling, linearity, causality – to the realm of the gallery space, the exhibition.
Screening by Deimantas Narkevicius'
DRAUDZIAMI JAUSMAI / RESTRICTED SENSATION, Lithunia 2011, HD, 45'
Followed by a talk between Deimantas Narkevicius and Jan Verwoert
Friday, 17.02., 20:00, Arsenal 1

Psychosphere and Capitalism

The modulation of the "psychosphere" (Franco Bifo Berardi) is a crucial dimension of contemporary capitalism. It is that which exists between the individual and its psyche and a collective whose imaginary is largely formed by mass media and the economy of social networks.How does one define the relation between a socio-political and a psychological today? What are its psychological effects and symptoms? This panel asks for the actuality of the critique of psychiatry that had its origins in the 1960s for current debates, and explores different aspects of an aesthetic "symptomology".
Panelists: Kodwo Eshun (Exhibitions), Iram Ghufran (Exhibitions), Angela Melitopoulos (Lectures and Performances)
Moderation: Anselm Franke
Saturday, 18.02., 17:00, Veranstaltungsraum, Filmhaus 4th floor