Who will save us?

Silvia Kolbowski presents the video works Who will save us? (2022) and Missing Asher (2019) in two exhibition spaces at Kunsthaus Glarus. The work Who will save us? was created especially for the exhibition. The video is a collage of two films: Metropolis (1927, directed by Fritz Lang) and THX 1138 (1971, directed by George Lucas). Both originals are science fiction films addressing futuristic life and work structures in distinctly two-class societies—albeit with different plotlines. Both films explore themes of workplace alienation, group conformity, and how easily people are manipulated. In Who will save us?, Kolbowski’s pointedly balanced, experimental compilation of elements drawn from both films examines how various political systems foster specific group ideologies. The explicit choice of two films from various decades of the twentieth century calls attention to their transferability to current events such as the storming of the Capitol in Washington in 2021, or to comparable occurrences based on similar dynamics. Kolbowski is concerned with such social patterns and the subconscious embracing of their ideologies throughout history. In her work, Kolbowski employs mainly time-based media to grapple with questions of historicity, political resistance, and the influence of the subconscious on socio-politically motivated mass movements. As part of her conceptual approach, she often draws on historical source material in analyzing and working experimentally with cultural phenomena and power-structure imbalances. The video Missing Asher (2019) is a further elaboration on Enlarged from the Catalogue: Michael Asher Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979 (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1983), a site-specific, installation work from 1990. In this video, Silvia Kolbowski addresses the creation and evolution of her own work. In the voiceover, she recaps the difficulty of surviving on the art market with noncommercial, ephemeral, artistic work. In addition, she investigates the connection between attributes of individualism in late-‘80s-emergent neo-capitalism and the format of the group exhibition and its signs of wear and tear in the gallery system. In Missing Asher, Kolbowski is concerned with the rules dictating the commercial circulation of aesthetic values and their only seemingly negotiated neutrality. The video work raises the question of whether the de facto stipulations of the art market are permanently aligned against conceptual, research-based works.