Hito Steyerl: Junktime
April 16–May 31, 2014
Opening: Wednesday, April 16, 7pm
Home Workspace Program (HWP), Ashkal Alwan
Building 110, 1st Floor
Jisr al Wati, Street 90
Beirut 2066-8421
Lebanon
T +961 1 423879
hwp [at] ashkalalwan.org
Home Workspace Program (HWP) is pleased to present Hito Steyerl: Junktime at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. The exhibition is presented as part of Chapter 4 of the HWP 2013-14, led this year by Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle and open to all who wish to take part. For further information on the year’s program, click here.
Hito Steyerl: Junktime
Imagine an exhibition that cannot be sustained. That is falling apart before installation has even begun. That flickers on and off to skype notification sounds. That consists of nothing but these sounds. Because the space cannot be occupied. Its time cannot be filled. Because time and space already collapsed into twisted pockets of detritus, hastily patched over by shutterstock images.
Acceleration is yesterday’s delusion. Today you find yourself crashed and falling apart. You might try to occupy the square or bandwidth but who will pick up the kid from school? Your nerves are broadcasting emails into your molars. Someone tries to convince you to do a screening in broad daylight. Stop pretending there is electricity or enough time to watch that video all the way through. Stop pretending time exists. Stop pretending love exists. Stop pretending everything is fine because it really isn’t. Are your teeth on twitter yet?
Junktime depends on velocity as in there isn’t any, sorry. It happens in the sudden transition from 9g to -4g; or from vertical sovereignity to the diagonal rule of gangs and trend forecast agencies. Somewhere in there time fractures and breaks into segments of uneven intensity. Huge hangars pop up in service sector neighborhoods featuring members of lower digital castes struggling but unable to piece it back together. Junktime is exhausted, interrupted, dulled by Ketamine, Lyrica, corporate imagery stuff. Junktime happens when information is not power, but lands as pain. Junktime doesn’t have side effects, sorry. It is a side effect. It might scan your attention span and spam you forever.
Junktime is what happens if the rug of time gets pulled out from under time based media. No sequences other then permanent jumpcuts, no duration just loops, all running to the rhythm of misfiring neurons and intercepted geolocation data.
Welcome to junktime. Already available at a server near you.
The opening week will include talks by Hito Steyerl in conversation with Jalal Toufic, Hisham Awad, Brian Kuan Wood, and 98weeks.
Chapter 4 will include a keynote lecture and a six-session seminar by Jalal Toufic, and workshops, screenings and talks around the exhibition Hito Steyerl: Junktime, organized by Anton Vidokle.
HWP 2013–14: Chapter 4 Program
Friday, April 11
11am–4pm
By registration: “Montage in Writing,” writing workshop with 98weeks—session 1: Sampling, Plagiarizing, Appropriating
Montage in film consists of an assemblage of separate filmed sections, which form a whole, no matter how fragmented. Sections are selected, pasted together, cut, deleted, and assembled. When working on montage, rhythm, sequence and visual resonances are considered, but the politics of montage resides in the way relationships between images are created. Hito Steyerl reflection’s on montage, underlines the politics of editing and assembling images as a way of developing a “grammar of the political.” To reflect on the latter, 98weeks proposes a writing workshop that will tap into its current research, Feminisms. We will look at montage in writing as a technique to express a female or feminist subjectivity, and look at what grammar—using conjunctions, syntax, and punctuation—writers have used in order to reorganize the relations between subject and object, politics and rhetoric.
For more information on the workshop and on each session, click here.
Tuesday, April 15
6:30pm
By registration: orientation for participants with Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle
8pm
Public: “Creating Universes that Include Ruins,” keynote lecture by Jalal Toufic
For each of the five chapters in HWP 2013–14, Toufic will give a keynote lecture as well as a seminar in several sessions that explore a variation on “creating universes that don’t fall apart ‘two days’ later” that relates to the inclusion in these universes of what would ostensibly make such an endeavor even more difficult than it usually already is: mortals, labyrinths … The fourth chapter is concerned with creating and then dispersing universes that don’t fall apart “two days” later even when ruins are introduced in them.
Wednesday, April 16
7pm
Public: opening of Hito Steyerl: Junktime
For more information on the exhibition and screening program, click here.
8pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 1—Strike, 28 seconds; How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 14 minutes; Liquidity Inc., 30 minutes
9pm
Public: conversation with Jalal Toufic & Hito Steyerl
Thursday, April 17
12pm
By registration: visit to National Museum
7pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 2—Is the Museum a Battlefield, 40 minutes; Guards, 20 minutes
8pm
Public: conversation with Hisham Awad & Hito Steyerl
9pm
Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 3—I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production, 30 minutes
Friday, April 18
6pm
Public: excursion to B018
8pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 4—Journal Nr. 1: An Artist’s Impression, 21 minutes; In Free Fall, 34 minutes; Adorno’s Grey, 14:20 minutes
9pm
Public: conversation with Brian Kuan Wood & Hito Steyerl
Saturday, April 19
3–5pm
By registration: “Montage in Writing,” writing workshop with Hito Steyerl & 98weeks—session 2: Articulations
6pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 5—November, 25 minutes; Lovely Andrea, 30 minutes; Abstract, 7 minutes
7pm
Public: presentation of “Montage in Writing” with 98weeks & Hito Steyerl
8pm
Public: selection of films by students of the Berlin University of the Arts / UdK. For more information on the screening, click here.
Monday, April 21
8pm
Public: 2084, Episode 3: The Noosphere by Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan
Screening followed by a conversation with Anton Vidokle and Marwa Arsanios
Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan’s 2084 is an ongoing exploration of the history of the future, translated into films. In Episode 3, filmed last summer in Turkey, Vidokle and Tan refer to the circle of ideas of Cosmo-Immortalism, a vitalist philosophical movement of the early twentieth century, which strongly influenced the Communist Revolution. The script for the film, narrated by a donkey and a plant, is a collage of texts by and about scientists: Vladimir Vernadsky, one of the most ardent partisans of the idea of the “noosphere”—a sphere formed by human reason around the surface of our planet, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the intellectual father of Soviet space exploration.
Tuesday, April 22
3–5pm
By registration: Image as Life-form, workshop with Brian Kuan Wood (group 1)
Are images more than we are?
Every Tuesday from April 22 till May 27
6:30pm
By registration: Creating and Dispersing Universes that Include Ruins
Weekly seminar in 6 sessions with Jalal Toufic
Wednesday, April 23
11am–4pm
By registration: “Montage in Writing,” writing workshop with 98weeks—session 3: The Sentence as Montage
Thursday, April 24
7pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 1 (see April 16)
Friday, April 25
4–6pm
By registration: Image as Life-form, workshop with Brian Kuan Wood (group 2)
Are images more than we are?
Monday, April 28
7pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 2 (see April 17)
Friday, May 2
11am–4pm
By registration: “Montage in Writing,” writing workshop with 98weeks—session 4: To be determined
Monday, May 5
7pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 3 (see April 17)
Monday, May 12
7pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 4 (see April 18)
Monday, May 19
7pm
Public: Hito Steyerl: Junktime screening program 5 (see April 19)