Public Program of Classical Period

A two-part screening programme coinciding with Dora Budor's solo exhibition Classical Period at Woonhuis compiles a selection of films and videos by Salim Bayri, Julie Becker, Marleen Gorris, Morag Keil, Klara Lidén, and Volker Schreiner. The screenings serve as a gesture of tacit meditation on transient themes glimpsed in Budor’s oeuvre.

Opening with the sole full-length film in the programme, a 1982 dramatic thriller, A Question of Silence, tells the story of a spontaneous daytime murder in the city of Amsterdam by three women who failed to be coerced into admitting insanity for the sake of a societal sense of security. In the debut work of Marleen Gorris, the quasi-judicious reading of the motiveless killing as a brutal vociferation is met with a nuanced silence. The triggering aspects of Gorris’ film prompted the decision to start the second screening session with Volker Schreiner’s Cell. A metacinematic montage of 266 classic film fragments of static television screens in living rooms becomes a monophonic device of an ominous countdown. Barely exceeding 1 minute, the resonance of nonhazardous domestic activity in Morag Keil’s Alice in the kitchen provokes a cathartic and subversive reaction to the architectural setting. A translation of a popular Moroccan phrase, “You Can Keep It Eat It,” expressed in exasperation, titles the video documentation of a performance by Salim Bayri, ‘sonyfying’ his experience of being denied access to the Sahara archives in the southern French region of Aix-en-Provence. Bayir turns the institutional building into an ‘instrument’ as he taps it with handmade cork and a wood mallet. A premeditated disobedience in the misuse of infrastructural space also occurs in You're all places that leave me breathless, where Klara Lidén weightlessly performs an onerous ‘dance’ to distorted bass groove on the metal scaffolding underneath the elevated U1 train in Berlin. A vertiginous footage filmed in portrait mode encapsulates the body without entry or exit points. The palpability of disorienting ramifications of spatial integration, be it interior or exterior, and its acoustic conjunction materializes in Federal Building with Music by Julie Becker. Accompanied by Banda Arkángel R-15, extracted from a cassette tape found in the Cal Fed car park, Becker commandeers the monolith structure by having its architectural model penetrate her apartment. To quote Becker, this “incredible disappearing experiment” concludes the screening programme.

Introductory remarks by Gvantsa Jgushia, curator of the screening programme.