Finissage Weight of Abundance Event

On the occasion of the last few days of „Weight of Abundance“ a final curatorial tour and screening of artists films will engage in the discussion of Overproduction and the materiality of the image.

Linking with themes of labour, power, and decay, the films also bring up notions of emancipation and the contemporary relationship with postmodernism in terms of post-soviet, post-colonial, and themes of emancipation. Beginning with the failure of early capitalism in the post-soviet block countries, Ana Gzirishvili’s new film is a mini-operetta based in the storage of her father’s hot tub and Jacuzzi import business. The amount of stored and abandoned hot tubs correlate with the ups and downs of the economic cycle of crashes, crises, growth and abundance.

John Stezaker’s long and distinguished career has consistently dealt with the power of images. The photographic image is a documentation of truth, a container of memory, and an increasing medium of our interaction with reality. In Horse, Stezaker combines multiple similar images in order to create a dizzying flux of catalogue images in an oxymoronic stream of the distinct and the similar. Narda Alvarado meanwhile films one of the largest flea markets in the world which takes place in Bolivia. Second hand clothes and factory rejects make their way from the Western world to be sold here on the street. This is why Ivy League American and European University hoodies can be seen in use for their purely functional value by shoppers in the market to whom these exclusive and expensive universities are completely out of reach. Starting from the sweaters, Alvarado’s thesis spins questions about the brands and values of western education versus the indigenous schools that teach collaboration and cohabitation with Bolivia’s environment.
From commercial products to the masses of human bodies, John Stezaker’s collage film Blind again concocts a quick array of images and human faces that bridge Alvarado’s film with the power of the image. The rapid succession refers to the subliminal messages of images and the societal constructions present in filmic culture. Lastly, Santiago Mostyn’s Altarpiece is an assemblage of archival, historical, and contemporary found footage that positions the black body in capitalist America against post-colonial revolutionary Southern Africa and the Caribbean. The film is part of the project Red Summer Edit which is usually accompanied by a photographic installation and video-lecture.

The video series will impact considerations present in the exhibition and the role of objects in society’s hierarchies of power and their obsolescence as a vortex of decay.