–Liquidity Inc. by Hito Steyerl, as part of The New Model
–”The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements and the Struggle for Social Justice”
–Transmission from the Liberated Zones by Filipa César. As part of “The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements, and the Struggle for Social Justice”
–Tensta Museum Continues with Laura Oldfield Ford, Adam Tensta: SR Urbania, and others
Liquidity Inc. by Hito Steyerl
October 10, 2015–January 10, 2016
“Be water, my friend,” reads the initial phrase in Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014), a video installation about the formless, floating, violent, and simultaneously vital water. In Liquidity Inc., water gushes out of television screens and iPhone screen savers. It functions both as a liquid and as an inexhaustible metaphor: the liquefied form of capital, the dot-com bubble when it bursts.
Using montage as its idiom, Liquidity Inc. tells the story of Jacob Wood, a martial arts enthusiast who lost his job when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis. Wood’s story is interspersed with footage from boxing matches and weather disasters, Hito Steyerl’s own chat conversations, and images of an ocean and a horizon where the water seems to speak in its own typeface: “I am water. I’m not from here.”
Liquidity Inc. is on view as the final part of The New Model, a project initiated by Tensta konsthall in 2011. The New Model’s starting point is Palle Nielsen’s The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society that was installed at Moderna Museet in 1968 by cultural journalist and author Gunilla Lundahl and a number of urban activists.
“The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements, and the Struggle for Social Justice”
Symposium: Saturday, October 17, 10am–6pm
The symposium forms the starting point of a multi-year inquiry into the relationship between art and solidarity movements, performed in a series of exhibitions, workshops, presentations, and film screenings. Faced with fascist parties gaining ground in Europe and an increasingly tough social climate, we see the necessity to return to the notion of solidarity in order to try its validity today. Will solidarity still be relevant in the future, or is it a historical concept? Do we need to find new ways to describe the political movements of today and their struggles, sympathies, and commitments? Some of the invited speakers are Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (Metz), Filipa César (Berlin), Kodwo Eshun (London), Stefan Jonsson (Norrköping), Kristine Khouri (Beirut), Doreen Mende (Berlin), Bojana Piskur (Ljubljana), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Berlin/Tehran), Rasha Salti (Beirut), Rojda Sekersöz (Stockholm), Gulf Labor/Ashok Sukumaran (Mumbai), Dmitry Vilensky (St Petersburg), and Marion von Osten (Berlin).
Transmission from the Liberated Zones by Filipa César
October 17, 2015–January 17, 2016
Saturday, October 17, 7–9pm opening for Filipa César’s new film Transmission from the Liberated Zones, commissioned by Tensta konsthall. Filipa César’s extensive research has focused particularly on the position moving images hold for the liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau and on the ways film was used both as a strategy to make the people aware of the struggle and as a tool for visual nation building. The international presence allowed an insight into the specific conflict. In conversations with Swedish filmmakers Lennart Malmer and Ingela Romare, former speaker of the parliament Birgitta Dahl, and UN observer Folke Löfgren, the linear story is mixed with documents, photographs, and clear memories. They reminisce about scents, endless marches, and the meaning of wearing guerrilla uniforms. These memories are linked together by what appears as an experience of an embodied solidarity.
Tensta Museum Continues follows up on the exhibition Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden about history and memory in Tensta. In the small exhibition space, the museum takes the form of a classroom. Here, Tensta konsthall’s Swedish Arabic language cafe will take place. From December onwards, the artist Laura Oldfield Ford’s drawings of a Tensta in transformation will be on view, and the online platform Space will present the radio program SR Urbania with the rapper Adam Tensta reporting from a future Tensta.
