Artist Talk: Mila Zhluktenko & Daniel Asadi Faezi

Artist talk accompanying the screening programme with Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi
Moderation: Anne Bitterwolf

“Aralkum” (2022, 14 min.) was the first video work co-directed by Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi. The film serves as a memorial to the Aral Sea, the fourth-largest inland sea in the world until the 1960s, though it has now almost entirely dried up. The video conveys with striking clarity how human intervention, specifically the Soviet Union’s destructive irrigation policies in support of cotton production, gradually destroyed an entire ecosystem and the life it sustained. The two filmmakers combine archival material with contemporary footage. Images of nature, still hauntingly beautiful despite the catastrophe, appear alongside intimate family scenes and shots of preserved animal specimens.

“rückblickend betrachtet” (in retrospect, 2025, 14 min.) brings together three different historical moments. Munich’s Olympia-Einkaufszentrum or Olympia shopping mall was largely built in the 1970s by so-called “guest workers” and was considered the largest shopping centre in Europe at the time. In 1982, the Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless made the film “Empfänger unbekannt” (Addressee Unknown) in response to the increasingly overt hostility directed towards people labelled as “foreign” in West Germany. In 2016, nine people were murdered in a far-right terrorist attack at the Olympia-Einkaufszentrum. Zhluktenko and Asadi Faezi weave these layers together to show that racist violence is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a continuing historical trajectory.

Both films can be viewed on the day of the event until 3:30 pm.

In German

Free admission, registration online
 

Location

IBB Video Space
Alte Jakobstraße 124–128
10969 Berlin

Ticket

Participation is free of admission.

Registration

Registration online
Registration form