Friday, October 07th 2016 – 16:00-17:30  – canceled due to illness!

The concomitant loss of film’s emphatic avant-garde status has been addressed in manifold delineations of the ‘work of mourning’, which assert the displacement of cine-material into the contemporary art space as its fate, yet preserving its fragmentary afterlife. This discourse in mind, the contemporary inquiry into the ruinous state of architectures, cultural artefacts and derelict urban landscapes of the post-war era in various settings of cinematographic installation art is deeply entangled with the historical paradoxes between utopian aspirations and the physical, social and ecological decay of their material representations. Exemplary works will be explored from different vantage points to address questions of regeneration by means of the archival materiality of memory and anachronic disruptions of chronological temporality. The talk will reference Mark Lewis’ filmic reflections on the impermanence of Modernist buildings, the installational framing of Karina Nimmerfall’s investigation of Possible Scenarios of a Discontinued Future (2015) that crystallized in the social vision of a city within a city for a working class population on the site of the displaced communities of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop, finally replaced by political resentment and private enterprise lobbyism in general and Cyprien Gaillard’s oneric 3D filmic sculpture Nightlife (2015) evocatively concerned with cultural vandalism, failed experiments of modern housing, the violence of commercial spectacle and the persistence of racism, signifiers and intrinsic to the instability of planetary life.