The Nuclear Football

Korpys/Löffler

02.02. - 04.02.2024

Filmprogramme

The film is part of the event programme:

"HAVING REACHED A CERTAIN POINT OF CRUELTY, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO COMMITTED IT: IT SHOULD JUST STOP"

The Programme comprises a series of video screenings by the artists and directors Ursula Biemann, Klaus vom Bruch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Korpys / Löffler and Martha Rosler.

Each screening will be followed by an introduction, discussion and week-long presentation. States and political alliances are based on imposing their own ideological concepts as the ones that set the tone. What means do they use to do so? And how do governments act when their current political and cultural claims to leadership are challenged from within or without? When hegemony crumbles?

How do they hold together what may have been constructed from the outset on the basis of artificial narratives and the exclusion of divergent points of view?

In light of current events and using artistic means, the series examines how Western governments instrumentalized the experience of terrorist attacks in the context of the "German Autumn", "9/11" or the so-called "Middle East conflict" in order to homogenize public opinion. And even to discredit peaceful forms of protest and criticism.

Korpys / Löffler: The Nuclear Football, 2004, 31 min.

In their artistic-documentary projects the duo Korpys / Löffler (Andree Korpys and Markus Löffler) use the methods of the modern surveillance state and reflect it back onto the state itself, focusing on its mechanisms and structures of power represented by institutions like the UN, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the BND (Federal Intelligence Service), the European Central Bank, prisons, or the police. Despite these highly charged subject matters, their films remain non-judgmental and objective and don’t engage in investigative journalism. Instead, the aesthetics of peripheral events, secondary characters, and details are their focus of attention.