Inverso Mundus(2015), 4K Video Art, 38 min.

The title of this video, Inverso Mundus, means the world upside down. Engravings in the genre of “World Upside Down”, known since the 16th century, depict such scenes as a pig gutting the butcher, a child punishing his teacher, a man carrying a donkey on his back, man and woman exchanging roles and dress, and a beggar in rags magnanimously bestowing alms on a rich man. These engravings contain demons, chimeras, fish flying through the sky and death itself, variously with a scythe or in the mask of a plague doctor. The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian “reverse, the opposite” and the Old Italian “poetry,” and Mundus – the Latin “world,” hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.

Festival of Sacrifice (2012), HD Video Art, 18 min.

Festival of Sacrifice was originally made as a 6-channel video installation, depicting the ritual slaughter of a goat during the celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. Through multiple mirroring the extreme footage is sublimated into a series of images that resemble traditional Islamic ornamentation. The skilled dissection of the animal body is reflected in the kaleidoscopic dissolution of the video image. The emotional and aesthetic aspects of ritual religious practices are here heightened by the musical soundtrack of the work. The celebration of Sacrifice harks back to the very origins of religious thought. All religions begin with a sacrifice. Festival of Sacrifice is part of a series of videos that looks at aspects of Islamic culture as a source to explore formal qualities of representation and the underlying links between cultures. Filmed on the Kenyan island of Lamu during the celebrations of Eid-ul-Adha, the video recreates, through the multiplication of images, the kaleidoscopic patterns that highlight the spiritual aspect of the event. Intercultural relations, whether seen as an exchange or a battle, are strongly influenced by the impact of images and their use. While religion and technological development are often used to reinforce differences, electronic inter-connectivity has created a platform for mutual interaction and transformed the very concept of landscape.

Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015), HD Video Art, 14 min. 9 sec.

Nothing Escapes My Eyes takes us on an intimate journey through identity and history. David Krippendorff’s time-warping tribute to a changing world presents a would-be Aida, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, shedding tears for a place and time which no longer exist. Nothing Escapes My Eyes is about a silent transformation of a place and a human being, both subjected to the melancholy of conforming. The film was inspired by the famous opera Aida, to depict in a metaphoric form current issues of cultural identity, loss and the pressures to conform. The film refers to the following historical event related to this opera: Aida premiered in Cairo in 1871 at the Khedivial Opera House. One hundred years later the building was completely destroyed by fire and replaced by a multi-story parking garage. Nevertheless, to this day, the place is still named Opera Square: Meidan El Opera. The film combines this urban alteration with the painful transformation of a woman (actress Hiam Abbass) in the process of shedding one identity for another. With no dialogue, the film is backed by a musical excerpt from Verdi’s opera Aida, whose lyrics express the difficulties of being loyal to one’s country and cultural identity. The personal and urban transformation tackles issues of identity, loss and disorientation as a result of historical colonialism and contemporary globalization.

ATARA (2019), HD Video Art, 15 min. 20 sec.

Shot on location in Berlin, ATARA tells the story of two iconic buildings that used to stand at the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss, destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII, and the Palast der Republik, built in its place as the GDR seat of government in 1973, and destroyed in 2008 to make way for the rebuilding of a contemporary copy of the Stadtschloss. The resurrection of this historical copy did not begin until 2013 due to the controversy surrounding this project. In a city perpetually treading the fine line between moving on from its painful history while never forgetting it, the decision to resurrect the Stadtschloss is interpreted by many as a willful erasure of its GDR past and a dangerous rewriting of history. This controversy is keenly felt in a city still building over its bomb craters, even more than 75 years after the end of WWII. ATARA follows a symbolic ceremony that takes place in the Palace during a moment when one building is being resurrected and the other building is dematerializing into a ghostly memory. Following an astronaut wandering through the construction site of the new Stadtschloss, carrying an iconic lamp from the destroyed Palast der Republik, ATARA deals with the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. The music is based on the Liebestod aria from Wagner’s opera ‘Tristan and Isolde’, rewriting the musical score as mirror of the original then digitally reversing it, like travelling backwards and forwards in time.

Transoxania Dreams (2011), HD Video Art, 23 min., Kazakh with English Subtitles

Almagul Menlibayeva’s film tells a tale of ecological devastation in the guise of a mythological narrative staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. Transoxania Dreams is filmed in the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea, where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once-thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation policies. The region of Transoxania in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxania lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain ravaged by metal scavengers, while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter observing the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. In her symbolic dream, the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the mythological figures of the Centaur and of Kazakh folklore, Menlibayeva creates a magical landscape with alluring hybrid beings, sexually charged and bizarre.

B.T.R. (Born to Run) (2020), HD Video Art, 20 min. 3 sec.

Video and installation artist Nina E. Schönefeld examines the contemporary social and political climate, exploring the relationship between art, blockbuster movies and the present digital age. Her stories imagine a world where, due to drastic political shift, we need to fight for our democratic rights and survival. B.T.R. is set in the year 2043 in a dystopian future of authoritarian autocracies and restrictions on journalism, where data is the most valuable asset on earth, and authoritarian right-wing governments have implemented youth education camps to gain power and influence. The film’s hero, SKY, grew up in one such education camp, WHITE ROCK. Knowing nothing about her parents she begins to research her heritage, getting in touch with a group of independent journalists and publishers, the most persecuted people on earth, threatened by prison and death every day. In this allegory of a not far-distant future, it seems that freedom of speech is lost forever. The video B.T.R. is intended as a preventative measure against such dystopias. It was created as a film of the future but has its roots in the present. It is based on detailed research on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden; on Cambridge Analytica and the pervasive power of data mining; on the crucial role of investigative journalism and the need for freedoms of the press; on the stories of deserters from the far-right.; and on the growing strength of far-right movements around the world, which leads Schönefeld to draw frightening parallels with conditions which led to the rise of Fascism in Germany in the 1920s.

Light Space Materia (2020), HD Video Art & Digital Animation, 8 min. 27 sec.

David Szauder’s film Light Space Materia translates Bauhaus ideas on technology, new materials, and light into a digital context, upgrading an iconic work of the 1930s into a 3D digital animation and algorithmically derived soundscape. Taking as his inspiration the kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (1930) by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder re-created his own large-scale rendition of this iconic work in 2020. Szauder subsequently used this installation as the basis upon which to make a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes. Szauder recontextualizes into digital media the driving principal of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s aim to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world. Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how contemporary technology could change the formal expression of movement and capture the physicality of materials in a digital context. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. This characteristic forms the essential basis of Szauder’s work, which applies computer code to create his animations and soundscapes derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of his Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of materiality of the image.