As part of their festival "3hd 2024: The Shadows That Linger" Creamcake is a guest at Berlinische Galerie with the film programme "Spirit Pictures". The three-week festival celebrates its tenth year by engaging with the unseen and the unsettling. In working through the past to imagine a better future, the selected artworks of the festival dive deep into the hauntological space between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The "Spirit Pictures" moving-image program summons the spectres of time and memory, and beaming into multiple bygones via narratives around the social and political, physical and metaphorical spirits that haunt our every day. Five artists capture the poignancy of temporary existence by sharing a snapshot of their own unique world views.
Programme
Abdessamad El Montassir "Galb’Echaouf" (2021)
While investigating an event that profoundly changed the landscape of the Sahara, Abdessamad El Montassir was faced with the silence of previous generations who remain haunted by a history that they are unable to tell. With "Galb’Echaouf" (18:42 Min.), El Montassir focuses our attention on landscapes, plants and poetry, in search of answers or elements that could participate in the reconstruction of this collective amnesia and its narrative transmission. "Galb’Echaouf" blends scientific inquiry with poetry to create an oral history passed down through generations, while giving agency to those plants and inanimate entities that interact with, transform, and impact the world around us.
Cihad Caner "I, The Green Marble; The (Hi)story Of My Witness and Memory" (2020)
Amplifying the narratives of marginalized figures from complex, transnational histories, Cihad Caner‘s "I, The Green Marble; The (Hi) story Of My Witness and Memory" (12:59 Min.) is a research-driven challenge to dominant worldviews, revealing the hypocrisy and shifting roles in global politics. A CGI-animated version of the iconic green serpentinite slab behind the podium at the UN General Assembly calmly and didactically admonishes his audience in a deep Italian-accented voice. Embodying over seventy years of silent observation, and having watched countless world leaders and revolutionaries, this sad stone character sees all these events blur into a collective memory that refuses to be forgotten.
Stephanie Comilang "Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise)" (2016)
Paraiso, an all-seeing drone spirit, is summoned every Sunday into the heart of Hong Kong where Filipina migrant workers gather to socialize. In the artist’s words: "The ghost or spirit in my film is called Paradise. She acts as an intermediary between the women and their place of origin. Often, when ghosts are portrayed in films, they try to find their way to the other side, and humans act as mediators to facilitate this passing. But in my film, it is the opposite. Paradise is the mediator who sends the women’s messages back home to their loved ones." As the women claim the public space, Comilang’s sci-fi documentary (25:44 Min.) considers social connections in today’s age of economic migration and modern technology.
April Lin 林森 "TR333" (2021)
In collaboration with ecologist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, artist-filmmaker April Lin 林森 presents "TR333," (10:16 Min.) a speculative documentary which imagines a new species of tree based on scientific literature on plants and climate hardiness. Their hybrid forms and body parts a patchwork amalgamation of different tree types, this tree is a climate adaptative response, a lifeform born out of resilience and hope. As the spirit inhabiting the tree emerges to converse with the viewer, they share with us their experiences of ecocidal generational trauma, urging us to reflect around the ways all the beings on the planet are deeply interlinked, and to honour our collective responsibility towards one another. Using a blend of 3D animation, found footage, and a musical score based on data sonification, "TR333" uses the speculative to recast the ecological crisis, asking "Why is this important?" from a multispecies and affective gaze.
Micaela Durand & Daniel Chew "38" (2021)
Vivid interruptions of sound and images fragment the psychic landscape of a 38-year-old woman who becomes obsessed with the social media presence of the young woman who broke up her relationship. The latest entry in a series of short films, "38" (22:44 Min.) explores the entanglement of desire, sexuality, race, and class as filtered through the distracted, overloaded, and constantly-documented reality of hypermediation. Durand and Chew continue to examine the embodied experience of our hybrid online-IRL existence by mining contemporary life’s nuanced exchanges be-tween longing and looking, voyeurism and the desire to be seen.
Creamcake
Creamcake (CC) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary platform, negotiating the point of convergence in electronic music, contemporary art, and digital technologies. Distanced from normative social structures, Creamcake moves in fluid processes of thought and action, engaging with contemporary social issues through diverse projects. CC organizes performances, concerts, exhibitions, symposiums, DJ sets, digital projects, and workshops. As a nomadic queer-feminist space, CC has cooperated with a number of clubs, community spaces, and institutions such as Berghain, Klosterruine, Wasserspeicher, OHM, Südblock, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, and Berlinische Galerie.
IBB Video Space
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.