Domination and the Everyday: Videos and Films by Martha Rosler – ​Part II

Join us at e-flux Screening Room for Martha Rosler’s South Africa: Crossing the River Without a Bridge (2016, 60 minutes), How Do We Know What Home Looks Like? The Unité d’Habitation de Le Corbusier at Firminy, France (1993, 31 minutes), and Prototype (God Bless America) (2006, 1 minute), followed by a discussion between Rosler and video artists Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner.

The evening constitutes the second part of Domination and the Everyday: Videos and Films by Martha Rosler, a three-day program taking place on the evenings of Friday through Sunday, March 18-20 at e-flux Screening Room. The program will present a selection of film and video works by Martha Rosler, and discussions with the artist and invited guests Nora M. Alter, Ernie Larsen, and Shelly Milner. Throughout the three days, a projection of Rosler’s silent Museums will eat your lunch (2013, 2 minutes) will be on view at the Screening Room library, where a reading group with Rosler will also take place as a post-script to the program (date and more details to be announced).

See the full three-day program here.

Screenings

South Africa: Crossing the River Without a Bridge
2016, 60 minutes
South Africa: Crossing the River Without a Bridge is a video edited from tapes from Rosler’s time in South Africa a few months after Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, in which she taught video to Cape Town university students and worked with NGO-supported township community groups ratcheting up their media production. In the months she spent there, she was in contact with various groups in the radically charged political landscape, often documenting her encounters. She videotaped conversations with South Africans across the social spectrum: comfortable academics, black squatters and township residents, dissatisfied Cape Colored tenants of public housing, colonials in Lesotho, white farmers, and the small group of Colored and Black people striving toward home ownership. Through these interviews and images of homes and shantytowns—interiors and exteriors, newly built or perpetually crumbling—Rosler accumulates what seems to become a body of shifting subjectivities collectively renegotiating what citizenship can mean in a post-colonial African state.

How Do We Know What Home Looks Like? The Unité d’Habitation de Le Corbusier at Firminy, France
1993, 31 minutes
This work was shot in a Unité d’Habitation, or housing project, in Firminy Vert, a complex in south-central France designed by architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). The Unité is part of a utopian complex of Le Corbusier’s buildings that includes a church, stadium, and cultural center. The work traces the building’s history through an engagement with the lives of its residents and traces of its past. Called Le Corbu after its renowned architect, the complex was built after his death. The wing in which the tape was primarily shot had been closed for over ten years, thus enshrining the decor of the late 1960s when the building was first opened. The mayor of the town, who had facilitated its development, subsequently tried to have the complex destroyed, and in this work the tenant association president describes the struggle—only half-successful—to save it.
The tape includes interviews with residents and with workers at the project’s low-power radio station. The opening sequence of views and snapshots is silent. Here is the space for an unspoken text about architecture and the warring interpretations of Le Corbusier’s idea of what might constitute a human, humane, humanizing space.

Prototype (God Bless America)
2006, 1 minute
A mechanical toy figure dressed as an American soldier bends and sways, playing “God Bless America”—the sentimental, unofficial, and highly favored national anthem during World War II—on a tiny bugle. The camera pans down, revealing that the toy’s camouflage-clad trouser leg has been rolled up to uncover a mechanism that looks uncannily like a prosthetic limb.

On view at the library

Museums will eat your lunch
2013,  2 minutes, silent
In this silent video, still images of stores and residential build­ings along a stretch of the Bowery in New York City appear in a stream within a cutout template, based on the “giftbox heap” silhou­ette of the New Museum, newly located on the Bowery. As these images of shiny storefronts, dwellings, and official Certificates of Occupancy of the “new Bowery” of the twenty-first century go by, set phrases rel­ating to the merits and demerits of museums roll desultorily down from above to below.
This silent video was commissioned by the New Museum for a street festival but barred by a ruling of the City of New York, which prohibits the projection of words on buildings except in certain designated corridors, as they might be taken for advertising.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.