Video loop, silent, 2013
The video by Margareta Kern is using stop-animation made up of 954 pigment-ink prints of every third frame of the news footage video taken by Tages Woche journalists, during the Basel Art Fair 2013. The original news footage documented an attack of the riot police on protestors who staged an intervention into the artwork ‘Favela Café’ by Tadashi Kawamata and Christophe Scheidegger.
Breaking down the violence of the riot police captured on camera, into every third frame, Kern’s video highlights the choreographed nature of the military state apparatus. The missing frames push us out to the surface of the image, revealing its immateriality, at the same time pull us in by the injustice that is being performed in a loop, endlessly, inside of it.
images that can’t take anymore. bodies that can’t take anymore. is part of a series of videos by Kern, titled To Whom Does the World Belong? taking its cue from the film ‘Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt?’ (Brecht, Dudow, Eisler, 1931)
Screened as part of a solo exhibition To Whom Does the World Belong?, KCB Belgrade, 2015 and VN Gallery, 2013; as a performance piece at the Whitechapel Gallery, London 2015; and as a talk with Valeria Graziano at BLOK, Zagreb, 2015
