Concrete Futures

March 8 2017 7 pm

screening and artist talk with Jasmina Cibic

screening programe: Tear Down and Rebuild | Jasmina Cibic | UK 2015 | 15' 27" | HD, Concrete Affection (Zopo Lady) | Kiluanji Kia Henda | Angola 2014 | 12' 30" | Video, Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability | Sebastian Brameshuber and Thomas Draschan | Austria 2004 | 3' | SD, Androids Dream (Sueñan los androides) | Ion de Sosa | Spain 2014 | 61' | 16mm to HD

Concrete Futures brings together films that deal with fiction and imagination, inviting encounters with speculative futures, which are nonetheless grafted onto the present ‘documentary’ moment that haunts them. Images as documents and as drivers of the imagination, Serbian, Rwandan and Spanish cityscapes are connected in a type of speculative haunting.

Selected by Mihaela Brebenel, Minou Norouzi and Nikolaus Perneczky in association with the Whitechapel Gallery symposium Object! On the Documentary as Art. Supported by Openvizor, and using public funds by the Arts Council England.

Tear Down and Rebuild | Jasmina Cibic | UK 2015 | 15' 27" | HD

Composed of various quotes - belonging to political speeches that emphasize the iconoclasm of art and architecture - the film creates an original conversation between four characters. A Nation Builder, a Pragmatist, a Conservationist and an Artist/Architect become a reflection of ideological deliberation facing a practical scruple. Including words drawn from Reagan’s speech on the Berlin Wall, Prince Charles’ 1984 address at RIBA and Isis bloggers’ proclamation on the demolition of temples, Tear Down and Rebuild uses rhetoric that endorses demolition as a necessary process to aid the creation of new displays for ensuing nation-states or ideological positions.