'I AM THE DANGER!' THE ART OF TV SERIES
Episode 2: On forests, bells, art advisors, sentimental futurists, mysterious illnesses, decorations of the mind, broken dicks, Latinos in Glasgow, getting your hair done, and how to turn your work place into a sheet of paper
30 November 2019
Featured artists:
Ale Bachlechner, Jonathan Kastl & Felix Zilles-Perels
Jan Bonny & Alex Wissel
Amelia Umuhire
Bastian Hoffmann
Camila Marambio & Carolina Saquel
Dafna Maimon & Sol Calero
Phil Collins
Rory Pilgrim
Shana Moulton
The Golden Brown Girls
Zhe Zhe
Join us for a unique screening marathon dedicated to serial storytelling in contemporary art! In this engaged act of collective binge watching, we will experience experimental artworks that imaginatively use serial structures to explore a variety of themes. We will start the event with an artist talk by Phil Collins who will present his works related to television. Come in comfortable clothes, bring blankets and any other binge-watching boosters! Popcorn, nachos and coffee will be provided!
Curated by Agustina Andreoletti and Aneta Rostkowska
"'I am the danger!'* The Art of TV Series" is a program at the Temporary Gallery. Center for Contemporary Art in Cologne, which presents artistic confrontations with television series. The aim of the project is to show how artists reflect the medium of the television series and how to artistically acquire it. The starting point of the entire series is the observation that television is currently experiencing a renaissance, especially in the form of television series. Millions of people around the world follow hundreds of TV series, which in this way become a very powerful means of conveying content of various (political, social, ideological) nature. The artists observe and comment on this development in their works of art, but also produce their own series. A subgenre here are, for example, artist webseries about inequality, commodification, institutional and structural defects in the art world and the role of the artists in it. Each presentation that takes place within the framework of the project will be accompanied by a discussion with invited artists and experts.
*Walter White in Breaking Bad
Jan Bonny & Alex Wissel, Rheingold
Rheingold, a ten-part web series is a frivolous social satire about the rise and fall of Düsseldorf art consultant Helge Achenbach. By manipulating invoices (artistic collages!), he earned a fortune and then ended up in prison for this million-euro fraud. With a light-hearted tone, director Jan Bonny and visual artist Alex Wissel have drawn up a comedy of manners about the role of art in neo-liberal flux, an entire generation’s loss of political and social values, and the demise of the leftist idea. The stage sets further exaggerate the unreality of this true fairytale and create the setting for an open narrative form in which roles are constantly swapped. A story about the longings of a trickster and the big question: how did Joseph Beuys’ dictum “everyone is an artist” turn into “Me, Incorporated”, how did art turn into a metaphor for entrepreneurial spirit?
https://www.volksbuehne.berlin/de/programm/fullscreen/869/rheingold
Amelia Umuhire, Polyglot
Amelia Umuhire wrote and directed the 2015 web series Polyglot, which is set in Berlin and London and explores the multi-hyphenate identities of young creatives of color. The show introduces viewers to Babiche Papaya, a rapper and poet played by the director's sister, Amanda Mukasonga. As Papaya tries to find a home among other international Berliners, the city is explored culturally, socially, and architecturally. Second episode, Les Mals du Pays, returns to the protagonist's world as she deals with the malaise of homesickness and the frustrations of maintaining a natural hair care routine. It's that time of the year when you realize you don't have enough money to pay your ticket back home... So you get your hair done instead.
Camila Marambio & Carolina Saquel, DISTANCIA
Recovering and examining irrational manners and erased realities, Camila Marambio and Carolina Saquel criticize consensual reality; recovering and examining other’s languages they criticize their means, also imperialist, also a resource. Seeking more just ways of living and dying, an unusual group of researchers traverses the erratic geography of Tierra del Fuego interrogating the enigmatic relationship between landscape and crime. Consisting of 7 episodes, the first season of Distancia is a poetical story that captures the entanglement of activists, trees, ghosts, artists, scientists, and the wind, all drawn in by the construction of a road that traverses the main isle of the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, Chile.
https://www.ladistancia.tv
Dafna Maimon & Sol Calero, Desde el Jardín
Desde el Jardín is an episodic “micro” telenovela written and directed by Sol Calero and Dafna Maimon. The series is shot on location in Calero’s eponymous installation at David Dale Gallery in Glasgow and stars Caique Tizzi in a gender-bending double role within a “rags to riches– and back” experimental narrative, among a cast of local Glaswegian Latinos. Desde el Jardín explores the articulation of love, status, and moral values imposed by telenovelas. The show is made by CONGLOMERATE, combining set design, props, music and cinematography from all of its respective members. In episode 3: El Señor lays dying, Amazonas throws a raucous party of sensual excess only to be confronted with the emptiness of "the good life". Tune in to find out what happens next on Desde el Jardín…
http://www.conglomerate.tv
Indrani Ashe, Sara Umar, and Shannon Lewis, The Golden Brown Girls
The Golden Brown Girls is a futurist version of the American sitcom Golden Girls, created by Indrani Ashe, Sara Umar, and Shannon Lewis. Women of Color are imagining their future, working in the art world 30 years now. They are no longer visible to society as mothers or sex objects, but they make their family structure by living together. The Golden Brown Girls still have troubles generated from interacting with a sexist, ageist, racist, economically precarious landscape. Every episode demonstrates strategies for working together to overcome these problems and flourish. The goal of the web series is to create the potential for new social structures in our present by collaborating with an expanding circle of women to visualize the future. In episode 7, Over Expo$ure Dollar$, The Golden Brown Girls get a taste of the Berlin Art Scene with their friend Nine. Expo$ure Dollar$ are scattered, and fresh-faced illusions are shattered! Episode 7 was created with guest artist Nine Yamamoto-Masson as part of a workshop at Frauenkreise, Berlin, Germany
https://thegoldenbrowngirls.com/
Zhe Zhe
Zhe Zhe is a comic fantasy created by Emily Allan, Ruby McCollister, Leah Hennessey, E.J. O’Hara and Max Lakner about the glamorous misadventures of two fame starved wannabes and their mad spiral into life in the fast lane. Mona de Liza and Jean D’Arc, known to their imaginary fans as “Zhe Zhe” (pronounced jhee jhee or ʒi ʒi) , are draggy campy “girls” who would do anything for a moment in the spotlight, even if it means venturing out into the mass hysteria of post-apocalipstick New York to do battle with vegan fascists, celebutante video artists, trust-fun-derground benefactor blonds, seductive comedians, nostalgic punks, Donald Trump(s), slactivist political protesters, transplant cool hunters, and the Middle Eastern oil industry. Trapped in the myth of “ye olde Hollywood,” stuck in the dream of a rock and roll suicide and utterly addicted to identity itself, Mona and Jean, already legends to each other, will achieve immortal fame if it kills them.
Rory Pilgrim, The Resounding Bell
The Resounding Bell is a seven-part short film series and live performance by Rory Pilgrim, co-developed with a council of women aged 22 – 94, who live and work locally to Peckham and Camberwell, and a group of young women from Harris Girls Academy, East Dulwich. The Resounding Bell explores how we might amplify otherwise unheard stories from the past that are in danger of being left silent for generations to come. With our lives dominated by digital communication, the intersecting episodes reflect on how we can come together from different generations to share stories, ask questions and listen in order to understand the past and move forward into the future. The council, an intergenerational collective of seven women, met to explore and share stories of care, community, migration, technology and war; to ask questions of the past and to propose questions for the future. At the Fire Station, the group of young women responded to these narratives, in sessions which took on a rhythm of call and response. Broadcast online and in the Fire Station Studio, Pilgrim’s episodes ultimately prompt us to reconsider how we might resonate our past and futures within the urgency of the present.
Phil Collins, soy mi madre, 2008
Relating to conceptual approaches to film and photography, Phil Collins investigates the nuances of social relations in various locations and global communities. In soy mi madre he works with telenovela, one of the most popular products of Latin America. It is a format that exploits the world market through the articulation and preservation of cultural difference, while at the same time serving as a powerful tool of self-representation and the re-signification of the continent’s colonial legacy. Shot in México City, soy mi madre is structured as a standard telenovela episode. The film is a tale of love, betrayal and family intrigue that explores the intricate power dynamics between unequals. A cast of leading Mexican television stars take turns at playing a spoilt mistress of the house and her resentful servants, with a dark family secret boiling under the surface and leading to an inevitably dramatic finale. Revolving around the ideas of role-playing and performance, masks and mirrors, symbols and rituals, soy mi madre posits social roles as volatile and unbalanced, defined by their inherent potential for theatricality and violence.
Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines
The mountainous California landscape around Whispering Pines, the trailer park near Yosemite where Moulton was raised, serves as a backdrop to Moulton’s cult video art series, its format inspired by Twin Peaks and Pee-wee’s Playhouse. In nine episodes dating back to 2002, Moulton appears as Cynthia—hypochondriacal, agoraphobic, and prone to surreal fantasies. Cynthia’s attempts to escape pain yield only fad cures; her quest for enlightenment leads to new-age kitsch. Cynthia's struggles with the mundane, the eclectic and the disposable offer a unique perspective on the relationship between spirituality and consumerism in contemporary society.
Bastian Hoffmann, Today I want to show you
"Today I want to show you" is a series of videos published online by Cologne based artist Bastian Hoffmann. His tutorials explain in classic "Do it yourself" way how to make a permanent puddle, a pile of identical stones or a bike that can be used to drive through mud.
Ale Bachlechner, Jonathan Kastl & Felix Zilles-Perels, studio hallo
People say: “When something like STUDIO HALLO pops up, it can come as a shock or as some kind of wake-up call. Or it can be a scene of sheer pleasure - an unnamed condensation of thought and feeling. Or an alibi for all the violence, inequality and social insanity folded into the open disguise of ordinary things. Or it can be a flight from numbing routine and all the self-destructive strategies of carrying on.”
Performative online TV format from a city that could be Cologne. With ideas and seeds that you would like to spread. Watch alone or with others, at home or elsewhere, on the laptop, on the mobile phone or on the computer.