PAIN AND SYMPATHY, BY WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

Episode #100: With his video "History of the Main Complaint" (1996) serving as a backdrop, William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth centurys most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work, Kentridge has earned international acclaim for his interdisciplinary practice, which often fuses drawing, film, and theater. Known for engaging with the social landscape and political background of his native South Africa, he has produced a searing body of work that explores themes of colonial oppression and social conflict, loss and reconciliation, and the ephemeral nature of both personal and cultural memory.

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EXODUS, BY MANDANA MOGHADDAM

Mandana Moghaddam knows firsthand the refugee’s sense of loss and displacement, hope and renewal. At age 21 she fled Iran after her father was executed in the revolution and she was barred from higher education as a penalty for political activities. After five years in transition in Turkey, she was granted asylum in Sweden, where she lives today. Her video installation captures that experience through the motion of suitcases adrift on the ocean, lost in passage — the baggage of our worldly goods that both protect us and expose us, cloak us and mark us as individuals or as members of a certain culture. The uncertainty of their delicate dance on the waves, and the comfort of reaching solid ground, evoke empathy and a desolate sense of loss, amplified by the sheer simplicity and beauty of the images.

Mandana Moghaddam's website

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SPOTS OF TIME, BY ROB JOHANNESMA

2013 / Refugees, Spots Of Time

The tension between the desire for radical change and the seeming intransigence of certain institutions that led artist Johannesma to create Spots of Time (2013). The work is a multichannel digital slide show that presents a compilation of newspaper pages and photographs from 2008 to the present that capture this phenomenon. As re-photographed by the artist multiple times and transferred to a different medium, each image guides our view beyond its immediate take as news to a more abstract reading of information. Although the language of the archive might seem incompatible with the spectacular nature of revolutions, Johannesma uses his role as an artist who understands and appreciates the complexities of image-making to create a compendium of the architecture, the objects, and the issues of freedom and citizenship embroiled in such occurrences. His conservation of moments of these ongoing struggles stands as an example of what playwright Bertolt Brecht called ermattungstaktik (‘tactics of attrition’), and the creative efforts of imagination and dedication, through which, however short the duration, the challenges of this world will eventually give way.

Clare Butcher

Rob Johannesma's website

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ESTRECHO ADVENTURE, BY VALERIANO LÓPEZ

Computer games taken to the limit.

The situations we see in a computer game are always fictitious, there's no man capable to do some of the things we see in them. Invading an enemy installation with a machine gun, or fighting many expert fighters without resting, etc. But maybe reality goes far away, even more than fiction. What about crossing the strait of Gibraltar (which is for the Moroccan like crossing through Mexican frontier to reach the United States for the Mexican) trying to get money to pay the Arab Mafia, crossing the sea with a poor boat avoiding the police, getting a job that can consist on many hard tasks, fighting the 'Guardia civil', a very hard police corps in Spain... It's a reflection on the reality that makes us think in the deep problems that affect our neighbouring countries in such way that people who lives in them is pushed to abandon their home places in search for a better life. A masterpiece in the short films little world.

Pedro Luis Azcárraga. IMDb, 12 January 2000

Artist's website

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ARCHIVE, BY ARKADI ZAIDES

Arkadi Zaides is an independent choreographer. He was born in the Soviet Union in 1979, and immigrated to Israel in 1990. Today he lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Archive, a solo by Arkadi Zaides, derives its source from the video archives of B’Tselem, a human rights information centre that gives cameras to Palestinians so that they can film their day-to-day lives in the occupied territories. On stage, the dancer and choreographer parades images of everyday violence between Palestinians and the settlers. He faces them and, as if looking for his place among them, reproduces the postures of the figures on screen. He glides from one body to the next, becoming a teenager throwing stones, a soldier firing teargas, an injured person being carried away… He extends certain movements, repeats others on a loop and, like an insane conductor, constructs a dance filled with gestures of violence. In turn playing a filter, a magnifying glass or a frame or hiding it altogether, Zaides continually moves around, shifting what we are seeing. He creates a maelstrom of sensations, a body-archive for us to delve into.

Arkadi Zaides's website.

 

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SAFEGUARD EMERGENCY LIGHT, BY BERTILLE BAK

Bertille Bak’s (*1983) works often come about in collaboration with individuals or with communities. The French artist’s videos, but also her drawings, objects and installations are particularly concerned with minorities and with their reality in society. As a rule, she spends several months with the respective groups, in the course of which she involves them in her films. She is not so much interested in observing or documenting the reality of their lives specifically, but initiates group-dynamic communicative processes and social changes through the collaborative way she creates art.
Safeguard Emergency Light System (2010), a seven-minute film shot in documentary style, tells a story of protest by residents living in an apartment complex of about 2,000 households in the Din Daeng neighbourhood of Bangkok, Thailand. In 2008 the city-housing authorities announced that, due to the poor conditions of these decadesold apartment blocks, the occupants would be evicted and the buildings demolished to make way for a commercial centre. In response to a lack of compensation or housing offered by the government, the members of the Din Daeng community launched a years-long neighbourhood resistance, which was seldom covered by Thai media.

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FREEDOM FRIES: STILL LIFE, BY YOSHUA OKÓN

For Freedom Fries Okón convinced both a McDonald's manager to grant him access for an overnight shoot and a McDonald's loyal customer to participate as a model.

The resulting work references the way in which the body is tricked and, above all, dehumanized by the corporate environment. In this sense, the site itself acquires a symbolic nature: McDonald's, as a representative of corporate culture, references the way in which "consumer society" alienates the human body.

In Freedom Fries the obese body becomes the evidence of a neoliberal system which ideology promotes an idea of freedom based on disproportionate consumption and the continuos promotion of low self-esteem. In such a context, the work points out the irony of how, in the name of Freedom, we have become prisoners of our own bodies.

Freedom Fries documents the consequences of an economic and political system that has eroded our agency so deeply that we have lost not only the connection with other species and other human beings, but we have also become alienated from our own corporality.

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AN EYE FOR AN EYE, BY ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI

Oko za oko (An Eye for an Eye) consists of a set of three large-format color photographs and a video. The photographs and video depict naked men with amputated limbs, accompanied by able-bodied people, who in the staged photographs and in the film "lend" their limbs to the amputated as they stroll, climb stairs or bathe. The naked bodies of the protagonists were assembled by the artist in complex compositions creating bodily hybrids: two-headed men, men with two pairs of arms etc., and at the same time the appearance of new able-bodied organisms in which the “healthy” supply the amputated with substitute limbs. The title of Zmijewski's work recalls the antique rule of dispensing justice, but the artist is not concerned with the question of revenge but with that of possibilities.

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BRICK SELLERS OF KABUL, BY LIDA ABDUL

Lida Abdul is an Afghan artist who works in a variety of media that attempts to understand the destruction and political unrest that has ravaged her country for the past several decades. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973, Abdul was forced to flee her country in the late 1980s. She lived as a refugee in India and Germany before moving to the United States. It was not until 2001 that Abdul returned to Afghanistan, where she has since staged video-based works that explore the interconnection between architecture and identity.

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ZERO

In a world that judges people by their number, Zero faces constant prejudice and persecution. He walks a lonely path until a chance encounter changes his life forever: he meets a female zero. Together they prove that through determination, courage, and love, nothing can be truly something.

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