The Double Feature sees itself as a platform for different currents and forms of expression in film and video art production. For more than eight years, the SCHIRN has invited national and international film and video artists to present a work from their own oeuvre, followed by a film of their choice. Films and video works by over 60 artists have already been shown at the SCHIRN. The videos and conversations with the artists involved so far are available on the SCHIRN's YouTube channel under the title "Video Art." The SCHIRN MAGAZINE also regularly provides discursive contributions with an editorial focus on video art to the Double Feature series
Photographer and video artist Flo Maak has been exploring queer history, food, and body politics in his work for over 15 years. His short film "Hang On, Hang Tight" (2022, 36 min.) focuses on an almost forgotten uprising during Mardi Gras in 1955, in which queer visitors to a bar in New Orleans defended themselves against police harassment. The incident is all but forgotten today, with few documents to back it up. "Hang On, Hang Tight" reconstructs the events through a variety of interviews with contemporary witnesses and historians. The accounts are intercut with sequences of dance choreography developed in collaboration with choreographer Diogo de Lima, suggesting an unfolding of the events. Shots at night show the famous Bourbon Street, the site of the uprising at the time and a central hub for bars and strip clubs in the heart of the city, deserted. Only remnants of a debauched party night can be seen, linking the present and the past of the historic party mile. The film was made in cooperation with Danish filmmaker and artist Lasse Lau (*1974), with whom Maak has been working on projects since 2006.
Driant Zeneli (*1983) has already twice featured in the Albanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His predominantly cinematic work is carried by a humanistic ethos that consists in the construction of social utopias and the constant failure to realize them. His most recent trilogy is about fairy-tale creatures and fabulous stories, which Zeneli has set in three historic, brutalist buildings in three Balkan cities - Pristina, Tirana and Skopje. He will also show this trilogy at the upcoming Double Feature at the SCHIRN.
Maeve Brennan is a London-based artist and filmmaker. She works with moving image, installation, sculpture and print media to explore the political and historical resonance of material and place. She develops long-term investigations guided by personal encounters, drawing on expert knowledge that encompasses a material practice, such as that of geologists, archaeologists, or restorers, with a particular focus on repair. In An Excavation (2022), she works with forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis to track down international underground networks that facilitate the looting, smuggling and sale of cultural artefacts.
Film artist Karimah Ashadu explores living and working conditions, patriarchy and notions of independence in the socio-economic and cultural context of Nigeria and West Africa. At the SCHIRN, Ashadu will show her film Plateau (2021, 30 min.), named after the Nigerian state of Jos-Plateau. The video work follows a group of miners who illegally mine tin and columbite in this region and opens a postcolonial discourse. After the end of the trade in the minerals, which was founded in colonialism, in 1985, many companies there were closed and the workers laid off. However, the knowledge acquired was passed on and independent communities formed to mine for minerals again. Plateau portrays workers, villagers and landowners reflecting on the destruction of the landscape, injustice and the dangers of tin mining. At the forefront, however, is the quest for independence through work. Ashadu thereby directs the gaze unabashedly to the beauty of the rutted landscape and creates a real image of the dangerous working conditions without moralizing.
