x-mission

Ursula Biemann

12.01. - 25.01.2024

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.

Ursula Biemann: x-mission, 2009, 40 min.X-Mission (2008) is a video essay on the extra-territorial status of Palestinian camps and the refugees who inhabit them. It is conceived to be intensely discursive, an experiment in theoretical criticism of the multiple discourses which constitute the camp. The 40 minute video delivers something of a geological cross section through the juridical, philosophical, urban, post-industrial, mythological, and post-national narrative layers that articulate the highly compressed space. The speakers are explicitly labeled The Lawyer, The Architect, The Journalist, The Anthropologist, The Historian, The Refugee, unmistakably speaking from a particularly informed position. Together they form a dense narrative space, mirroring the compressed zone of the camp. In this anthology of remarkable expertise offered by various scholars, what takes shape for once is not the metaphorical waiting room for a disabled and interrupted history to pick up momentum again, but a veritable factory of ideas. In view of what could almost be described as an archeological endeavor, video is used as a cognitive tool to get to know the deeper strata of things.