Selected Videos From
The 1st Kiev Biennale:
The Best of Times,
The Worst of Times

SALT Beyoğlu, Front Door

Curated by David Elliott
BERLIN: MOMENTUM and Collegium Hungaricum
İSTANBUL: SALT Beyoğlu

MOMENTUM has organized a special programme of video works, originally screened at the 1st Kiev Biennale in 2012, to be shown simultaneously in Berlin and İstanbul. Titled The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, the selection of videos will be on view at MOMENTUM Berlin between September 6 – October 27, and at SALT Beyoğlu during the opening week of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, as part of the SKY SCREEN initiative.

Curated by the Artistic Director of the 1st Kiev Biennale, David Elliott, the program features recent works by John Bock, Yang Fudong, Gülsün Karamustafa, Lutz Becker, Tracey Moffatt, Map Office and Miao Xiaochun. Echoing the first words of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens’ famous novel set at the time of the French Revolution, this program jumps forward to the present to consider how contemporary art and aesthetics use the past to express the future.


The notion of human rights emerged out of the 18th-century European Enlightenment and found its first political expression in the American and French Revolutions. Yet, despite all good intentions, the fact that each revolution contained at its core the worst as well as the best of human thought and action limited the ideal vision of human rights. This program reflects on the utopian dreams of freedom, equality, and security that are very much at the heart of our lives today, as well as on their opposite: terror, inequality, and war. Shown simultaneously in both Berlin and İstanbul, this selection of works is a timely response to the current situation in Turkey, where ideals of democracy and freedom have been brought into renewed focus.

The selection will also be screened at Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin on September 21-22 in the Berlin Art Week.

PROGRAM

Lutz Becker, THE SCREAM, 2012
Single-channel version of 3-channel video installation montage of films by Aleksandr Dovzhenko

John Bock, MONSIEUR ET MONSIEUR, 2011
Video, 36 min 49 sec

Yang Fudong, YEJIANG / THE NIGHTMAN COMETH, 2011
35mm film on HD video, 19 min 21 sec

Gülsün Karamustafa, INSOMNIAMBULE, 2011
Video, 11 min 40 sec

Tracey Moffatt in collaboration with Gary Hillberg, DOOMED, 2007
Video, 9 min 20 sec

Map Office, OVEN OF STRAW, 2012
Video, 12 minutes

Miao Xiaochun, RESTART, 2008-2010
3D animation, 14 min 22 sec


Organized by MOMENTUM in collaboration with SALT.