Daniel Asadi Faezi & Mila Zhluktenko, Aralkum, 2022
© Daniel Asadi Faezi & Mila Zhluktenko, Courtesy Daniel Asadi Faezi & Mila Zhluktenko“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.
“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. Its transformation into a barren desert landscape is particularly visible in the border region between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. A vast expanse of arid land (the “Aralkum” of the title) now covers the area that was once a body of water. 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.
Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi studied documentary filmmaking at the University of Television and Film (HFF) Munich. Their films have been screened and honoured at numerous international festivals, including the award for Best Short Film at Visions du Réel for “Aralkum”. “rückblickend betrachtet” premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, and it received the German Short Film Award.
Since 2011 the IBB Video Space has been screening artists who work with time-based media. The programme features not only established names in contemporary video art but also up-and-coming artists rarely seen in museums to date. For these, the Berlinische Galerie seeks to facilitate an institutional début.
Each screening brings a new encounter with work that raises questions about the medium and about social or political issues. Importance is attached to including marginalised perspectives and to shedding light on the impact of power structures.