Group Efforts

The artists and filmmakers gathered together for ‘Group Efforts’ sketch out terrains of struggle. With a subjective selection of works, the exhibition forms an idiosyncratic survey of contemporary audio-visual practices engaging with acts of solidarity and resistance. This resistance manifests in various ways. In some cases – in the context of war, for example – filming is an immediate tool in a struggle for survival and liberation; in other cases it is used to challenge embedded colonialism, or re-centre the body as a political agent. The works employ horizontal approaches to documentary, testing its capacities and limitations, witnessing the formation of communities and their upheavals, recording histories from below. Shifting between reenactment, slow cinema, and direct documentary approaches, the exhibition shows the interiority of life inside these various struggles, where political involvement and formal experimentation, play and humour, go hand in hand. Formally, culturally and geographically distinct, the works share the need to negotiate the spaces in which we live and act, the ways we live and work together, and the ways the past is written and can be speculated upon. These artists and filmmakers challenge conventional modes of production – both the individualistic tendencies of the art world and the strict hierarchy of the film industry – in an attempt not only to depict, but to remake the world. Collaboration is at the very core of the works, and through their proximity in the exhibition they form a coalition, with points of commonality across disparate contexts.