Johan Grimonprez. All Memory Is Theft
In the organizer's words:
With "All Memory Is Theft", the ZKM is showing a comprehensive retrospective of Belgian film and media artist Johan Grimonprez (*1962), whose work straddles the border between theory and practice, art and cinema, documentary and fiction.
"Who does our imagination belong to in a world in which existence is faltering and the truth is wandering around as shipwrecked refugees? Is it the storytellers who can keep the contradictions in check by slipping between the languages given to us and becoming time travelers of the imagination?" (Johan Grimonprez)
Based on an archaeology of today's media landscape, Grimonprez combines fragments from films, television news, advertising, cinema and amateur films as well as the Internet, weaving new narratives that put our perception of reality to the test. Grimonprez's works, which have been presented in the world's most important museums and have won numerous awards at festivals, show us the extent to which the ways in which actuality and imagination, CNN and Hollywood are represented today have become intertwined. They thus emphasize the complexity of our media-driven present, which is more susceptible to manipulation than ever in times of populism and conspiracy theories rampant on the Internet.
In the exhibition, Johan Grimonprez's works from the last 30 years are presented in a multi-layered parcours in which moving images, archive material and quotations are interwoven intertextually. The exhibition includes film installations, feature-length and short films, vlogs, storyboards and drawings by the artist and thus spans an arc from his early works such as "Kobarweng or Where is your Helicopter" (1992) and his multi-channel installation "It will be alright if you come again (...)" (1994) and his documenta X contribution "dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" from 1997 to his latest film "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat" (2024), co-produced by the ZKM for the exhibition and nominated for Best Documentary at this year's Oscars® - a fast-paced montage of archive material, about Congo's independence from Belgian colonial rule in 1960 and the assassination of the first freely elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, tracing the links between jazz music, geopolitics and colonial power dynamics during the Cold War.
Referring to Paul Virilio, Johan Grimonprez once said that every technology also produces its own accident: "Shipwrecks were invented with the ship, airplane crashes with flying," said the French philosopher and media theorist. One could add that reality has crashed with the invention of virtual reality and AI. Grimonprez's work therefore not only indicates that the media no longer has to catch up with reality, but that it is reality that has to catch up with the media today.
This content has been machine translated.Location
Organizer
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