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Conic Trilogy Study 2 explores the idea of machinery through its rhythmical and continuous production processes, the early association with a human being is quickly supplanted by the power and energy of the heavy machine. Filmed in black and white there is a poetic quality to the images which is added to and emphasized through the early slowing down of the movement. The viewer is lured into this sense of the ?romance? of the machine and its potential for endless production and the efficiency to manage that production without human interference. However the outcome of this reliance on the mechanical is answered in the latter part of the film. This is a powerfully metaphorical work that relates to contemporary political systems and movements.

Nooshin Farhid was born in Tehran, Iran and lives in London. She has been involved in a number of exhibitions, screenings and festivals both nationally and internationally. Nooshin Farhid?s video works whilst employing different subjects and scenarios have a connecting thread, a commonality, namely there is a certain kind of agitation, a restlessness, a sense of things not being right. This agitation and an unwillingness to settle for what is ?on offer? ( this is the way things are ), reflects upon the current state of things socially, politically and ideologically. Though not overtly political, for such a strategy inevitably enables privileged authority to manipulate the artist into the cul de sac of irrelevance, this work continually picks away at those familiar stabilising forces we encounter on a daily basis both within the social space of the everyday but also within the domain of contemporary art itself. Farhid?s work is eclectic and conceptually nomadic, she uses the camera as a visual notebook collecting fragments of encounters, events, chance meetings that collectively question the incessant drive towards normality and conformity through the pressure of state surveillance.

Criss Cross opens with a single image of a parked car lit only by a street light, although this ?minimal? scene is countered by the imposition of redness, infa red or night vision. This opening image in many ways sets the agenda for what is to follow, the colour red coupled with the overpowering element of water, a double saturation both literally and metaphorically. Criss Cross appropriates images from particular areas of media representation, the video takes genres that would appear to come from areas that might be generally referred to as ?low life? or an underworld of sexual exploitation and criminality. What follows from the opening sequence is a series of image clips, fragments, as if wrenched from more prolonged narrative sources, these visual fragmented elements have in common the night, what goes on in the night, what goes on in the ?after dark?. There is an almost subterranean quality to the series of rolling images, cars being broken into, sex chat line conversations, clandestine meetings in dark streets, empty car parks as sites of secret exchange and the imposing sounds and images of law enforcement, however the latter seem only on the periphery of this darkness.

Nooshin Farhid was born in Tehran, Iran and lives in London, she has been involved in a number of exhibitions, screenings and festivals internationally. She also co curated a number of exhibitions including ?Use this kind of Sky? which manifests as gallery show, video installation, radio broadcast, film/video screening and publication (www.nooshinfarhid.com). Nooshin Farhid?s video works whilst employing different subjects and scenarios have a connecting thread, a commonality, namely there is a certain kind of agitation, a restlessness, a sense of things not being right. This agitation and an unwillingness to settle for what is ?on offer? ( this is the way things are ), reflects upon the current state of things socially, politically and ideologically. This work continually picks away at those familiar stabilising forces we encounter on a daily basis both within the social space of the everyday but also within the domain of contemporary art itself. Farhid?s work is eclectic and conceptually nomadic, she uses the camera as a visual notebook collecting fragments of encounters, events, chance meetings that collectively question the incessant drive towards normality and conformity through the pressure of state surveillance. At the same time she appropriates that other form of ?making dumb? the popular media ? soaps, reality TV, Bollywood, MTV. This raw material is savagely and uncompromisingly edited and undergoes a form of post production, collaged fragments are welded together, each one activating and qualifying its predecessor. This process produces a contemporary surreal space that re-presents the familiar into that which is astonishing and invites the viewer to reconsider.

The central focus of ?Sleepwalker? is a single character, a young man who is seen in certain mundane urban spaces, apparently adrift, wandering aimlessly and alone. However this aimlessness quickly gives way to a realisation that there is an undercurrent of another kind of psychological space being experienced. He begins to investigate his surroundings, touching things, testing their surfaces as if not being certain of their material stability, as if they contain some element of threat directed at him, as he does so he triggers another kind of reality which might be seen as flashbacks, recollections of previous experiences or some form of neurosis. These threatening images filmed through a blue filter suggest a liminal space of paranoia, of anxiety, or perhaps of fantasy; there is a gradual but insistent fracturing and blurring of the notion of reality and the space of psychosis as if the rules of the game that determine our understanding of the way things are, are being broken.

Nooshin Farhid?s videos appropriate different narrative situations and filmic genres, re-presenting them in new and disturbing scenarios. Her starting point is often the ordinary, the commonplace or the culturally familiar. She acutely observes these mundane events extracting and editing them in such a way that there is an interplay between lucidity and reason, obsession and madness. Structurally these videos often appear fragmented and disjointed. The recognition of one filmic genre is disrupted by another in such a way as to continually avoid the security of familiar narrative territory, and as such does not allow the viewer full control over what they are experiencing. However throughout this ?schizophrenic? journey there is a certain logic of sense that threads its way through the complexity of the work

"Aux ouvriers d?une société industrielle se substituent les technocrates issus de l?ère informatique. La vision de la gestion des moyens de transport est saisissante : les employés des années vingt s?occupant de la surveillance des transports ferroviaires sont remplacés par des caméras vidéos reliées à des centres où un personnel surveille les écrans et analyse la multitude d?images reçues. Prenant la suite de L?homme à la caméra, les images sans cameraman de Farocki témoignent d?un regard critique sur notre société, où le développement des moyens de communication génère des outils de surveillance toujours plus puissants et conduit à la négation de l?individu."

Harun Farocki est né en 1944 à Neutitschein en Tchécoslovaquie alors indexée par l`Allemagne. De 1966 à 1968, il étudie à la Deutsche Film and Fernsehakademie de Berlin et est depuis cette date réalisateur freelance, de 1993 à 1999, il est lecteur à l?Université de Californie à Berkeley, depuis 2000 il enseigne à la Hochschule der Künste de Berlin au sein du dépatement Média. Ces films abordent les notions de politique et de mass média à partir d?un travail d?archives, de recherches et de réflexions théoriques sur la société contemporaine. Harun Farocki vit et travaille à Berlin.

Respite is set in Westerbork, a transit camp for deportees to Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. Powerful images are captured after the SS officer Gemmeker ordered production of a film about the camps. An inmate, the German-born Jew Breslauer, filmed scenes of work, leisure and a train leaving for the death camps with a 16mm camera.

Harun Farocki was born in 1944 in Neutitschein, Tchecoslovakia, then annexed by Germany. He studied at the Deutsche Film und Fernshakademie in Berlin from 1966 to 1968 and is since then freelance director. From 1993 to 1999, he was a lecturer at the university of california, Berkeley; since 2000, he teaches at the Hochschule der Kunst, Berlin, in the media department. His films approach notions of politics and mass medias based on archive work, research and theoritical reflexions on the contemporary society. Harun Farocki lives and works in Berlin.

Recycling materials with historic meaning are being put together by apprentices and professionals to erect a temporary event pavilion in front of the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin. The determining architectural elements of the pavilion are about 100 meters of re-used steel windows from the original Bauhaus building in Dessau. The process is in its aspects a declaration of love for the ideas of the Bauhaus.

In their films, illustrations and educational / curatorial work the Berlin-based artist duo Faroqhi & Peretz choose various themes such as biography, architecture and history. Their work examines social issues and critically deals with the way images are being produced and received as well as how stories are being told. Anna Faroqhi is a filmmaker and illustrator. Haim Peretz is a technician and filmmaker. Their body of work contains films, texts and illustrations as well as educational works and has been presented internationally in museums and art events. Faroqhi & Peretz teach video for opera directors and singers at Hochschule für Musik „Hanns Eisler“ Berlin. They also are engaged in the education of film and illustration to children and adults at various public schools, museums and institutions. Here, they are part of the Arsenal Film Studios at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video e.V., Berlin. Faroqhi & Peretz’ work has been shown Museum Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, Saalbau Neukölln Berlin, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Manifesta Italy, New York Film Archives, Goethe Institute Tel Aviv etc. The duo is currently working on a multimedia installation documenting refugee stories.

Whistling can be heard, there is a natural reverb, the sounds ascend up and it comes from outside the frame, from the streets. People on roofs keep looking down and up; some don?t seem to care drinking coffee and talking, a man stands up and start shaking a stick as he looks up, one shacks a big green and yellow umbrella. Bab el Ramaal is located north of the city of Tripoli in Lebanon.

Anthony Faroux b in Aix en Provence, is an artist based in London. He received an MA from the Royal Academy Schools in 2007.He completed his undergraduate education at the School of FIne Arts, Marseilles. He is currently Artist in residence at the Durham Cathedral and was awarded a residency at the British School in Rome in 2007/08. His work shown widely in London and internationally, including a Hex Project space commission in London this year. His work was screened at the Goethe Institute in Cairo, Egypt. Faroux presented a solo Exhibition at Five Years, London in 2010.

The film shows a preoccupation with movement and stillness. It mimics the act of ?scouting?. By ascending the mountain to its foggy summit, it suggests a motion, seeking areas in which to pause and explore stillness; a journey through a series of derelict places that are rich with suggestion and significance. We are led to an elevated place; however, one where clarity is fading.

Anthony Faroux was born in Aix en Provence in 1971. He went to school in Lebanon and Morocco. He studied art in France and UK. His practice is video, film and painting. He has been in residence at the British School of Rome in 2007 and just returned from a year living and working at the Durham Cathedral artist residence. His work has been shown across Europe for the last five years. He is currently working in London.

Newly built high-rise buildings in multiple areas of accelerated regeneration across London are abstracted in a series of free-falling motions. Through this abstraction comes an attempted reclamation of London’s skyline.

Syd Farrington is an artist and filmmaker living and working in London. His work has been shown internationally at International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Short Film Festival and Kasseler Dokfest, among others. Working with film, his work explores the physical effect of contemporary capitalism on the changing landscape of London. Often using place and landscape as a starting point, He navigates the interrelation of personal and shared experience, drawing from the vast history of cinema and modes of structural filmmaking.

"covert Loadstones" was originally released as a seven inch lathe record, produced by Tokyo-based record label "a binary datum" at the beginning of 2006. The recording is a performance of five of the artist's growth machines (manipulated tape machines), each contained in a polystyrene container, orchestrated to play noise with and against the boundaries of their cyclical norms. Each machine acts like a loadstone, believed to possess magical qualities and the power not only to attract, but to be attracted magnetically. The interaction between the eight-ohm speakers (outside the bins), contact microphones, tape-heads, and electronic components (inside the machines), and the air in between, are heard as call and response in the form of feedback, vibration, and electrical sine waves. The recorded noise possesses the whispers and disruptions of the invisible beings of the air, the class of immortals that belong somewhere between the material and immaterial, between those who have bodily frame and those who do not, mentioned by the medieval physician Paracelsus as the sylph. For Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Fassonaki plans on doing a live sound performance of ?covert Loadstones?. He will perform using the five growth machines, oscillator, delay pedal, and ring modulator used in creating the recordings; with the addition of my prepared laptop running a max/msp patch. As the machines rest on a table, hidden in their stark white enclosures, they will carry on their cyclical behaviourisms of tape-head amplification, spinning rollers, and feedback activities. Once they are approached and played, a process of becoming takes place - the sounds change from their repetitive nature into something alive and imaginary. The performance of ?covert Loadstones? will reveal this area of becoming or composed order, and that of unbecoming or diminishing structure, as signified by the sylph. As in previous performances where Fassonaki has enlisted various sound artists to participate he will invite New Zealand experimental musician Andrew Scott to perform the machines with him. The spontaneous and unpredictable interventions of another artist further diminishes set parameters, allowing the work to breathe organically. While Scott interacts with the machines, Fassonaki will be manipulating some of the incoming signals on her laptop creating a constant and unpredictable exchange of the raw and processed sounds.

yek koo is Helga Fassonaki, a sound and intermedia artist who recently relocated to Los Angeles, bringing with her a handbag of noisy transpositions, which she is covertly arranging under her solo name, yek koo. Her recent projects include "métal rouge", a sound collaboration with New Zealand musician Andrew Scott, and yek koo live performances and recordings using santur (Persian dulcimer), non-tape tape players (growth machines), Persian setar (sehtar), and other sound-generating transpositions. Fassonaki received a Bachelor of Art from the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo in 2000 and a Master of Fine Art from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 2006. During the past few years, she has participated in sound events and festivals such as Alleluya Noise and Transacoustic festivals in Auckland and Soundwalk2005 and 2006 in Long Beach, California. Fassonaki?s manipulated tape machines, sound-generating wind turbines, and noise creating installations reflect the desire to reveal the sonorous qualities of otherwise commonplace sounds, not as purely musical events, but rather as referential layers, "unencumbered by aesthetics" (Alan Kaprow, 1966).

“Jeg Er Enorme Jaevler I” is a video about the human incapability of expressing accurately their deepest feelings. It’s also a joint about depression, satanism, revenge and payback time. There is a lot of good music in it: Black Metal, Rap, Witch House and Bon Jovi. It’s full of 3d animations, texts and found footage too.

Lives and works in Asti. He makes works that explore and question the processes and the strategies regulating the production of contemporary artworks. In 2012 he created sibi, an instructions generator for the production of potential artworks. The software has been tested in workshops in collaboration with Universities and art institutions. In 2014 he presented Jeg Er Enorme Jaevler I, a 90 minutes movie in two parts and a performance. He has exhibited and performed his work at Carroll/Fletcher, London, ZHdK, Zurich, MARS Gallery, Melbourne, MAMbo, Bologna and Link Cabinet among many others. He was part of the Jury Selection of the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival and he has been recently selected for the Live Work Performance Act Award in Fies (Dro).

Khabur is the longest tributary of the Euphrates, a transboundary river crossing the border between Turkey and Northeastern Syria. The film departs an archaeological site in the valley of the Khabur River and follows the journey of Tell Halaf's archeological collection towards Berlin where it has resided since 1930. It traces the circulation of violence in different times and contexts along the Khabur River and engages with the economic and political power relations that have been transforming the landscape of the Khabur valley, displacing beings and their belongings. The film addresses photography and archeology as two disciplines emerging from the colonial-imperial enterprise, critically engaging with the imperial grammar of institutionalised archives, and examining the way it could be recycled, reimagined, and rehearsed.

Nafis Fathollahzadeh is an artist and researcher from Iran, based in Berlin. Fathollahzadeh works at the intersection of artistic research, video art and photography. In the academic years 2020-22, the are a fellow researcher in the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s scholarly program on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and are affiliated with EUME at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. They are an art director and co-editor of Momentography of a failure, a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform for collaborative thinking, artistic collaborations, digital mapping and publishing. In 2019, Fathollahzadeh was awarded a prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie for their project Momentography of a failure. They were the recipients of an DAAD International Scholarship for Artists.

« The Human Factor » is an experimental video work that explores the idea surrounding Art Deco and Exoticism. Exhibits concerning the native people of the colonies at the Paris Colonial Exposition which took place in 1931 during the interwar period, as presented within pavilions reminiscent of the architecture of the Black Africa, North Africa, and Indochina regions, had illustrated ties to the leading colonial rule and authority of the times. « The Human Factor » is a deconstruction of Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’inhumaine (1923). To this day, this film is considered as a manifesto of the Art Deco movement. This masterpiece in silent film that was filmed against the backdrop of modern and ornate set design, serves to vividly depict the various influences artists of the time had gained from the creations of distant foreign lands, as well as the very spirit that had permeated the era. L’inhumaine reconfigures the innovative methods of artists, decorators, costumers, and architects such as Robert Mallet-Stevens, Fernand Léger, Alberto Cavalcanti, Claude Autant-Lara, Pierre Chareau, Michel Dufet, Joseph Csaky, and Paul Poiret. This video work attempts to present another aspect of Art Deco that lay beneath the powers of colonialist ideology and its universal ambition. It should be noted that the influence of colonial art was not something that had emerged during the two wars of the twentieth century. Such had in fact existed since 1907 in the form of the “The Colonial Society of French Artists,” which was aimed at expanding colonial territory through art that would serve as beneficial to France. Awards and provisions of expenses to travel to the colonies were provided by the society, aiding artists such as Van Dongen, Matisse, and Paul Klee to sojourn in North Africa. By 1919, the Les Arts à Paris magazine had already introduced Art Nègre (African Art) as a “new aesthetic” that could have a great influence on European art. For example, African masks and sculptures became a subject of interest and source of inspiration for artists such as Picasso, as well as Fernand Léger who derived the ideas for his costume designs and stage sets for the Swedish ballet troupe “La création du Monde” through referencing “Aboriginal and African Art.” Furthermore in 1930, the “Exhibition of African Art and Oceanic Art” was held, organized by Tristan Tzara, Pierre Loeb and Charles Ratton. This exhibition served as an important step in the history surrounding primitive art in the West. Here, the Paris public was able to view a selection of primitive sculptures presented along with the works of Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Paul Guillaume and Félix Fénéon. Finally, at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition that served to present colonial ideologies in an explicit way, the distinct characteristics of respective ethnic groups in the colonies were only introduced under conditions of conveying France’s blessings to the colonies, in addition to solely the positive aspects of colonial development. With the exception of several masks, statuettes, and archaeological items, very few, if any, works made by the native people of the regions were exhibited. As opposed to such works, people in general had preferred the spectacle of pageantry created within the realms of dance, folk arts, and art, which in itself was a convenient perspective for the French and Western audience as a whole. It must also be known that these perspectives had not necessarily been shared among French artists. A group of surrealists including figures such as Louis Aragon, Georges Sadoul and André Breton, with the support of French Communist Party, had opposed the colonial exposition through distributing fliers featuring slogans that discouraged people from visiting. The Human Factor is a video work that approaches the issue surrounding the Paris Colonial exhibition, which had publically presented the relationship between what one might refer to as Avant-garde Primitivism, and the Exoticism of the Art Deco as inspired by the colonies. Studio Fatmi, September 2018.

mounir fatmi was born in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1970. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Rome, at the Casablanca Art School, and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He spent most of his childhood at the flea market of Casabarata, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tangiers, where his mother sold children’s clothes. Such an environment produces vast amounts of waste and worn-out common use objects. The artist now considers this childhood to have been his first form of artistic education, and compares the flea market to a museum in ruin. This vision also serves as a metaphor and expresses the essential aspects of his work. Influenced by the idea of defunct media and the collapse of the industrial and consumerist society, he develops a conception of the status of the work of art located somewhere between Archive and Archeology. By using materials such as antenna cable, typewriters and VHS tapes, mounir fatmi elaborates an experimental archeology that questions the world and the role of the artist in a society in crisis. He twists its codes and precepts through the prism of a trinity comprising Architecture, Language and Machine. Thus, he questions the limits of memory, language and communication while reflecting upon these obsolescent materials and their uncertain future. mounir fatmi’s artistic research consists in a reflection upon the history of technology and its influence on popular culture. Consequently, one can also view mounir fatmi’s current works as future archives in the making. Though they represent key moments in our contemporary history, these technical materials also call into question the transmission of knowledge and the suggestive power of images and criticize the illusory mechanisms that bind us to technology and ideologies. Since 2000, Mounir fatmi’s installations were selected in several biennials, the 52nd and 57th Venice Biennales, the 8th Sharjah Biennale, the 5th and 7th Dakar Biennales, the 2nd Seville Biennale, the 5th Gwangju Biennale, the 10th Lyon Biennale, the 5th Auckland Triennial, the 10th and 11th Bamako Biennales, the 7th Shenzhen Architecture Biennale, the Setouchi Triennial and the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in Japan. His work has been presented in numerous personal exhibits, at the Migros Museum, Zurich. MAMCO, Geneva. Picasso Museum La Guerre et la Paix, Vallauris. AK Bank Foundation, Istanbul. Museum Kunst Palast, Du?sseldorf and at the Gothenburg Konsthall. He also participated in several collective exhibits at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Brooklyn Museum, New York. Palais de Tokyo, Paris. MAXXI, Rome. Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. MMOMA, Moscow. Mathaf, Doha, Hayward Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, at Nasher Museum of Art, Durham and Louvre Abu Dhabi. He has received several prizes, including the Uriöt prize, Amsterdam, the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at the 7th Dakar Biennale in 2006, the Cairo Biennale Prize in 2010, as well as the Silver Plane Prize, Altai Biennale, Moscow in 2020.

Proposée pour la première dois à Londres, cette installation vidéo en noir et blanc met en scène un personnage cherchant à taper à la machine le titre au moyen de marteaux. Seul le ruban est rouge, laissant penser que le texte s’affiche en lettres de sang, dans un télescopage de « la beauté de la phrase à écrire avec la violence et la difficulté de sa réalisation. »

Behind the Shield paints a filmic portrait of the city of Beirut over the past three years. It documents key moments in the country’s recent history – from the October Revolution to the port explosion of August 4th – while also shedding light on the mundane and commonplace facets of everyday life. Behind the Shield is a reflection on the city and the dichotomies that exist within it, juxtaposing the impactful and the mundane; the colossal and the minute; the urban and the rural. The work also highlights the camera as both a silent observer and a silent participant in the events the city has witnessed. Crucially, it explores the video camera’s transformation from a device that is used to surveil, control, and oppress of the masses, to a tool that gives people agency and grants them a voice.

Sirine Fattouh is a Lebanese artist living in Paris. Interested by histories from below, her personal work, as a researcher and artist consists of examining the consequences of violence and displacements on people’s identities. She holds a doctorate in Visual Arts and Aesthetics from the University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and a Master degree from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts of Paris Cergy.

"Le Terrier (2)" is video freely inspired by the unfinished short story of Kafka that tells the story of someone going insane after having obsessionally dug his hole, and who persuades himself that he's threatened by the arrival of someone else. "Le Terrier (2)" deals with this shift moment when the familiar structure, supposed to shelter, becomes suddenly a threat : a woman and a man wander in a street where we can't tell if the houses are being built or have been destroyed by an anonymous disaster. In this crossing of a new city of the Parisian suburbs, the housing loses its primary function, since we don't know anymore if it accomodates or threaten, and if it forces to be on one's guard.

Elsa Fauconnet is a french artist, born in the parisian suburbs in 1984. After obtaining a Bachelor of Art at the "ENSAV - La Cambre" of Brussels, she gets a diploma from the "Ecole des Beaux-Arts" of Paris, with distinction from the jury. From engraving, video and photography, she questions the supposed pictures of the real. At first, she works essentially with images extracted from the medias. She appropriates these images that tell our contemporary history, and plays with rewriting History and questioning its conceptual substance. Progressively, her own images (the wall in Palestine, a city being built in France...)are reinstated in fictions. These pieces of real anchored to a historic reality reveal themselves as relics. They are concrete facts and allow at the same time the start of possible fictions, in the interpretation we give of it. Playing with several styles, Elsa Fauconnet's films create a trouble that reveals the difficulty of placing oneself into a story, a place, the real and its representation. In her work, there is also talk of territories, of borders, of dwellings, of the search of a home... She plays with strangeness : in german, the same word stands for stranger and stranger. Would the strange be the aesthetic corollary of the stranger ? "What interests me in the strange and the strangeness concepts is that they both result in casting doubt on every familiar reality, creating a favorable moment to detachment." Using strangeness in order to allow a new observation and a new emergence of the things.

The center piece (Blue Sky ? Palau) is a documentary movie shot in Palau. In November 2009, six ex-detainees from the US Prison in Guantánamo Bay have been released to Palau, which is known for its sparkling water, shiny beaches and beautiful diving spots. Faulhaber traveled to the tiny island nation of Palau in the South Pacific to visit the six men, which are part of the uighur minority in western China. He interviewed their Australian interpreter and his Excellency, the President of Palau. Following his trip to Palau, Faulhaber went to Shenzhen, China, to visit the Oil Painting Village Dafen, which is the world`s biggest conglomeration for reproducing and copying artworks. In Dafen he worked together with local artists to reproduce oil paintings from the portraits of the six men that can never go back to their homeland Xinjiang, which is now under Chinese hegemony. In this series of work Faulhaber focuses on some main questions surrounding the ideological and philosophical notion of the `picture` today: How strong is the global prevalence and regime of the picture? What kind of pictures are we supposed to conceive when thinking of Guantánamo? What is the state of the picture with regard to a global system of industrialized tools for copies, imitation and reproduction? Or, as W.J.T. Mitchell has raised the question: `What is the work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction?`

?I don?t see myself, primarily, as a political artist,? says Christoph Faulhaber. Still, there?s something disconcerting about this claim. A quick survey of the projects he has carried out to date tells us about the sale of Cuban real estate to customers in Florida, a preoccupation with the future of Ground Zero, problems with the FBI in New York, Faulhaber?s name on the United States Terror Watch List and the planning of an allocation center for former Guantánamo inmates in Hamburg. These are topics which catch our attention and brush on important discussions conducted in the media on a daily basis. Hence, Faulhaber made a name for himself in 2007 with his project Mister Security, which he carried out jointly with fellow artist Lukasz Chrobok over a period of three years. The project encompassed several actions in the public realm as well as two publications. Christoph Faulhaber, born 1972, is today one of the most promising young German artists. His work has been shown amongst others at the National Gallery Prague, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, Laiyan Gallery Hong Kong, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen, City Museum Remscheid, Kunstverein Hannover and Fridericianum Kassel.

The film is a sharp-witted and humorous reflection on reality and identity in the global, digitalized world. The material was developed with, among others, the video editor of the video game Grand Theft Auto by Rockstar Games. Avatar Nico Bellic is the intellectual alter ego and reflects on artist Faulhaber’s projects. In a fast-paced mix of documentation and fiction, classic narration, video clip and virtual reality, the director relates his own biography and discloses how he continuously hacks at the boundaries of prevailing systems, how he seizes public spaces, disrupting and, at best, changing them. With his colleague Lukasz Chrobok, for example, he founded the fictitious security service Mister Security in 2005 with the intention of monitoring the security of public spaces. His activities were monitored and a scholarship he received in the USA was revoked after questioning by the FBI. Faulhaber’s work exemplifies just how interlaced images and politics are in our society: “I reach into this network meaning, I re-sort the images anew and by doing so create a short-circuit.”

Christoph Faulhaber was born in 1972. He studied engineering, architecture and fine arts and graduated from Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in 2002. In 2005, Faulhaber ended up listed on the US terror watch list because of his performance `Mister Security`.

Exploring Dead Buildings is a video made in Georgia in the abandoned building of the Ministry of Highways of the Soviet Republic of Georgia. This video shows the discovering of this dilapidated space by a non motorized module on wheels that is moved by two operators. Only enlightened by two spotlights powered by a battery the camera make slow movement into the darkness and makes discover the complexity of this dead architecture.

« A dictator and a revolutionary icon are on a golf course ». What could have been the beginning of a strange political private joke led to something far more odd than expected. Acting like pro-players at the British Open, the two figures of Cuba communism regime, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara came up that day with a loopy idea : build on the island the most magnificent art school of south America. What Is left from this titanic undertaking ? Didier Faustino tries to answer that question with his A « Walker To Explore Dead Buildings » project. On the occasion of the Cuba Art Bienale, the renowned architect/artist invites you to a real first person exploration video game through this edifice drained of his essence. In a tropical atmosphere at dawn. Three young bodies deploy a choreography over the roof of a utopian curved architecture. These melancholics and heteronymous characters wear metallic suits as a metaphor of a caged youth. The cameras placed on the structure as well as those witch gravitate around them give us the image of a wandering over the ruins of the Cuban Escuela De Ballet de La Havana. The films brings out the failure of this architectural and cultural utopia. The performance underline the memory of the desire for a better future. The scene of light and darkness intersperse themselves, Between exterior and interior, day and night, at the service of a fictional esthetic.