Wyspa Institute of Art / Buffet /  Hall 90B
27 of September 2011
7.00 - 11.00  PM

Curators: Inke Arns (Dortmund) & Thibaut de Ruyter (Berlin)
Coordinator: Daniel Muzyczuk
Advisor: Michał Libera

The exhibition and film programme INDUSTRIAL asks ‘whatever happened to the industry?’. It would in fact appear that industrial modes of production have not so much disappeared as migrated from one place – the early industrial countries – to another. While ‘first-world’ nations have only just completed a 40-year-long history of de-industrialisation, so-called emerging countries are undergoing a rapid and massive process of industrialisation. How has the industry managed to resettle in those regions (notably China and India), what are the working conditions in its new factories, and what is its heritage in the areas it has left behind? Has it actually susbsided in traditional industrial countries, or is the notion of immaterial labour merely an uncanny resurgence of the classic industrial model, whose might is now inscribed in contemporary, post-industrial modes of production? Within the framework of the Culture Season North Rhine-Westphalia in Poland 2011/12 Tam’Tam, over the course of the first two weeks in October the HMKV will present INDUSTRIAL on Tour, a film and music programme hosted by five industrial towns in Poland (Bytom, Tarnów, Łódź, Nowa Huta/Kraków, Gdańsk). During this time it plans to conduct further research for the exhibition in collaboration with the respective local partners.

Moreover the curators in each venue will give a talk about the project and the results of the research followed by screening of selected videos and a concert by Dortmund based experimental musician Jim Campbell.

The project is being realised within the framework of the Culture Season North Rhine-Westphalia in Poland 2011/12.

Screenings:

Jacek Niegoda
Balet zurawi (Ballett der Kräne / Cranes’ Ballet), Video, 10 Min., 2007

"Following the path of the Russian avant-garde and its infamous Symphony of Sirens made by Arseny Avraamov in Baku in 1922, the polish artist Jacek Niegoda creates a choreography for a few cranes. Industrial machines have, we know it for a long time, their beauty and we learn, with this short video, that they also can be full of grace, subtility and humor".

Harun Farocki
Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik / Workers Leaving the Factory, Video, 36 Min., 1995

"One one the first movies ever made depicts workers leaving happily the factory of the brothers Lumière in Lyon in 1895. Harun Farocki uses that film as a starting point for a political and cultural drift through the history of cinema and its relationships with industry".

Ulrike Franke, Michael Loeken
Losers and Winners, documentary, 96 Min., 2006

"In the early 2000’s, a chinese company bought a gigantic coke factory based in Dortmund. For many months, four hundred chinese workers lived in the german city and took patiently down, bit by bit, part by part, piece by piece, the entire factory. It was then shipped and reassembled (and copied) in China. The documentary follows that process and shows the meeting of the last german on the site with the chinese workers. Still, at the end, it is difficult to figure out who are the winners and who are the losers".

Concerts:

Jim Campbell (aka the preterite) is a turntapelist, for lack of a better term. Inspired by proponents of experimental work with vinyl, both avant-garde & hiphop, he started to experiment with the lofi electronics that he found lying around, primarily relics of the tape age. Over time this work elbowed out his time spent behind the drumkit & soon he had put together a unique instrument, his “cassette scratch orchestra”. Campbell works in a variety of contexts, most notably solo, improvising freely, scratching abstract-emotive tone poems on the fly. Aside from composing for theater & dance, he curated the innovative “baender bender” concert series in Dortmund, Germany, & has played with musicians as diverse as Claus Van Bebber & DJ Elephant Power, to name a few. A solo debut double cd will be released on the American label Weird Forest in summer 2011.
www.jimpermanent.com

Curators

Inke Arns, Dr. phil., Since 2005 artistic director of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund (www.hmkv.de). Since 1993, independent curator and writer focusing on media art and theory, net cultures and Eastern Europe. Exhibitions at home and abroad, inter alia IRWIN: Retroprincip 1983-2003 (2003), What is Modern Art? (Group Show) (2006), The Wonderful World of irational.org (2006), History Will Repeat Itself (2007), Anna Kournikova ... Art in the Age of Intellectual Property (2008), Awake, only the spirits - About Ghosts and their media (2009), Building Memory (2010), Arctic Perspective (2010). Studies in Slavic, East European studies, political science and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988-1996), Ph.D. in 2004 at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a dissertation on the paradigm shift in the reception of the historical avant-garde and the utopia-term in (media) art projects the 1980s and 1990s in former Yugoslavia and Russia. Teaching assignments at universities and art academies in Berlin, Leipzig, Rotterdam, Zurich and Dortmund (2000-2011). Author of numerous articles on media art and net culture and editor of exhibition catalogs.

Thibaut de Ruyter is an architect, writer and curator. He lives and works in Berlin. He is a regular contributor to the magazines Art Press, Il Giornale dell’Architettura, Particules and Zitty and has contributed essays to various catalogues. He curated the radio exhibition Investigating EVP (www.radiogallery.org) and edited a special issue of Art Press about Berlin. In early 2008 he organised the exhibition Weniger Geld, Mehr Liebe (Less Money, More Love) presenting his private art collection at the artist-run space TMP in Berlin. He co-curated The Last Ten Shots at Bongoût Gallery in Berlin, and Wach sind nur die Geister (Only the Spirits are Awake) with Inke Arns at the HMKV Dortmund in 2009 and CoCA Torun in 2010.