Postproduction

9 November – 21 December 2023
Opening: 8 November, 6-10 pm

I.G.-Farben-Haus der Goethe-Universität, Raum 1.357 im 1. Stock

ATHANASIOS ANAGNOSTOPOULOS
HARRIET MIDDLETON-BAKER*
JACKSON BEYDA*
NIKOLAS BRUMMER
DYLAN SPENCER DAVIDSON
EUNJUNG HWANG
MARIE-ALIX ISDAHL*
VERA KARLSSON*
ATIENA R. KILFA
BLAISE KIRSCHNER
JAN KUNKEL*
SOPHIE LEE
FLORINE LINDER
LUZIE MEYER*
JAKOB OHRT*
IGA ŚWIEŚCIAK
DAIVA TUBUTYTĖ*
NIKHIL VETTUKATTIL*

The majority of professional filmmaking is a highly efficient and top down industrial art that is fundamentally conservative in method. Film production subordinates the process to principles of efficiency – time is lost profit; things move on after the first acceptable take. Technically refined over more than a century, it's hard to disentangle if capital or artistry has the greater role in the picture of the way things go. Artists film and video is often predicated as an alternative to this mainstream, but the singular artist has little control over the collective conditions that determine the field, limited access to high production tools, and demanding constraints of funding that narrow the possibilities to experiment. The expectation of innovation, or simply novelty, is counteracted by the very structures that promote it. By inverting these relationships of what is in and out of shot, process and results, The Institute for Scene Experiments (ISE) explores the agency as well as the limits of the individual, playing them against the oppressive as well as emancipatory tendencies of group dynamics. Doing this consciously references moments in radical film history where the social life on set, and how to transform it, mattered just as much as the one being represented on the screen.

At Studiengalerie 1.357 we present a first attempt to work with the exhibition as format, editing understood in its widest sense. The works presented depart from material made in a workshop at KW Berlin in December of last year developed with Atiena R. Kilfa on the occasion of her solo exhibition “The Unhomely.” Sixteen collaborators over three days worked with industry standard equipment and camera phones on an improvised set. A semi-structured framework was used to produce footage that was then made available to edit collectively for those who wished to. The works in this exhibition are the result of a number of individual practices working in coordination in an open ended process.

The Institute for Scene Experiments is an institution devoted to the investigation, production and dissemination of scenes. It is a situation for exchanging knowledge around different technical aspects of filmmaking and performance. We analyze, deconstruct and reconstitute elements of scenes for camera, exploring alternative ways of staging narrative, framing, sound, etc. ISE aims to reflect on the film crew as a social form, to explore alternative modes of production and working conditions. We engage the generativity and potentialities of scenes independent of plot, development and conclusivity through commissioned text, open rehearsals and collective editing.

“Postproduction” by The Institute for Scene Experiments is the second of two exhibitions at Studiengalerie 1.357 to take place in the context of a seminar by Dennis Brzek that took place in the summer term 2023.

[* workshop participants also directly involved in the exhibition]