paradoks 2023: UNEARTH

paradoks 2023: UNEARTH
05.10.–22.10.2023

Opening: 05.10.23, 6.30 at the HGB Gallery, 8pm at KV Leipzig

The video art exhibition paradoks is located at the intersection of visual art and moving image and is dedicated to documentary formats beyond the cinema hall.

The third edition of paradoks, from October 5 to 22, 2023, under the title UNEARTH, asks about the nature of cultural memory in the Anthropocene. What myths, utopias, rituals, and narratives shape our conception of natural space, wildlife, and the Anthropocene - this geochronological epoch in which humans exert significant influence on events in the planetary atmospheres and biospheres? How is the past remembered through human-altered landscapes? What reminders do ruins and artifacts overgrown by nature contain?
The focus is on four multi-channel works that operate at the edges of the documentary and can be seen for two weeks at the gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts and at KV - Verein für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig in Kolonnadenstraße.

In the HGB Gallery, Nick Teplov's THE COMMUNE and DE ANIMA by Clara Jo enter into dialogue with each other and reflect on the interconnectedness of ecosystems with social factors such as race, gender and the manifestations of (neo)colonial power relations on a global scale by means of landscapes, their animal inhabitants and human legacies.

With THE COMMUNE, Nick Teplov places the ruins of a Soviet fur farm at the center of his two-channel installation. The remains of the abandoned farm become projection surfaces that resemble penal camps in their architecture and construction. Using archival footage from a Stalinist propaganda film, Teplov goes in search of the cracks within the collectivist, socialist utopia. In DE ANIMA, Clara Jo illuminates the porous membrane between humans, animals, and landscape that can mutate into a high-risk interface in times of global interconnectedness. In Myanmar in 2018, she accompanied wildlife veterinarians in their search for strains of coronavirus in bats that are potentially dangerous to humans. In the works exhibited at the HGB Gallery, different time levels collide: while the ruins of the farm are becoming increasingly overgrown and disappaearing as a totalitarian memorial, the biologists' investigations in bat caves in 2018 seem like harbingers of the impending pandemic.

MORI by Su Yu Hsin and TROPICAL STORY by the collective ikkibawiKrrr also explore interwoven dimensions of the nature-human relationship in KV. In them, the focus is on performed rituals, artifacts, and memory spaces that repeat, change, or physically inscribe themselves into the landscape. Nature serves as a source of knowledge and inspiration for the telling of story(s).

Artists' talks and an extensive supporting program complement the installations.

Together with the Cinémathèque Leipzig, paradoks presents short films and performances on two evenings. Under the title LANDSCAPE, artistic positions are negotiated in which the landscape is both background and foreground, object of human observation and subject that defines the horizon of observation. SEASCAPE, on the other hand, brings together works that examine political and historical conflicts along the water's edge, as well as techniques of emotional and mythical meaning production centered on the sea. Naomi Hennig, Julia Mensch and Vanja Smiljani? complement the short film programs with performative interventions. In the parasound section, dedicated to the acoustic possibilities of documentary forms, Jacob Kirkegaard will perform the soundscapes of two of his works live at UT Connewitz. The focus will be on the sonic landscapes of war and the environmentally transformative power of the Chernobyl nuclear super-GAU.

In collaboration with the WRO Art Center (Wroc?aw, Poland), we will show a video work by Emanuel Gollob about robotics, A.I. and the ambivalence of locomotion at the .mpeg on Lützner Straße.

paradoks is a project of the Filmische Initiative Leipzig (FILZ) and GEGENkino.
In cooperation with HGB Galerie, KV - Verein für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig e.V., Cinémathèque Leipzig, UT Connewitz and WRO Art Center.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig and the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony. This measure is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget passed by the Saxon state parliament.