Interior, City, Day

Time folds. It runs forward in loops and spirals, is stopped, punctured, contracts to a tiny point of a split second, is printed or stored in code, or it drags on, unchanged. It crystallizes in stone monuments, crumbling megaprojects, splinters into artefacts until it twitches and meanders on. The exhibition Interior, City, Day shows recent works of young artists and filmmakers and attempts to bring together cinematic, architectural and mental spaces. In each film, continuous sequences combine several shots to form a seemingly coherent, seamless whole - a statement, a state, a status, a science fiction, a story. Script/Continuity is a field of work in film production - its task is to pay attention to the connections during filming to avoid continuity errors: for example, gaps in dialogues, axis jumps, suddenly changing rooms or locations, slipped costumes, changed postures or hairstyles, the disappearance of entire people or objects, information that suddenly appears and changes the course of the story. To maintain the fiction of seamlessness, visible artificial montage has to disappear. Like film montages reality, memory interweaves events, feelings, spaces and places. Becoming a character in your own story, casting the character of your own mother, roaming old hard drives, turning archive drawers on their heads, or organizing screen grabs and sideway glances at dream worlds and political fictions. Memories as virtual architectures that encounter themselves in unconstructable staircases. In my room, I keep a black shoe box. It‘s full of photos, trinkets, stones, coins, twigs, past versions of myself, and versions of people, places, times. I assemble a patchy past from these bits, with feeling filling in the gaps between the objects. The objects in the box are fixed, balanced – but their image isn‘t. I remember a perfect storm. I forgot to take a picture. Can you inhabit the streets of a city like you inhabit a story? And is it only fun to be a main character if you are also the author of the story? The city is the reality interface of those who live within. If you can move smoothly within it, you are its ideal user. The data storage on the hard disk of a computer is something secure and fixed that you can save and retrieve later. At the same time, your data shadow walks ahead of you, and the map will soon precede the territory. When planning cities, entire neighborhoods might be redesigned with a single authorial stroke on paper - but a desire line eats into the fantasized English lawn, and the city is reshaped by its inhabitants. Interior, City, Day. The private space, the public space, representational space where a city might look at its own constructed image, and the spaces in between unfold in concentric rings of interiority, encompass inclusions and exclusions, incorporate natures and technologies, and end in the interior space in which the brain lives. Does what we experience remain as virtual infrastructures in our heads, to be climbed, sped along? Tableau vivant, still life, gaze regime, projection, construction, point cloud, haunting. Living memory as image that is both constantly moving and also moves others - as fragmented, scattered, re-assembled, simulated, rendered or exploded views. Freezing a moment and looking at it from all sides. The artists in this exhibition build new point clouds, distributed images and desired constellations for processes, feelings, statuses that mostly remain without image. Eunju Hong‘s video Where the Bodies Go and installation Room for Moulting connect e-waste recycling in Taiwan, alongside its renowned semiconductor industry, with cycles of production, disposal and possible resurrections. As technology advances, countless digital devices are manufactured and eventually discarded once they reach obsolescence. This cycle of production and disposal has made the extraction and management of scarce natural resources a focal point of intense geopolitical competition. During a residency in Taiwan, the artist delved into the lifecycle of these machines. She became intrigued by how these devices coexist with our bodies, and what becomes of them once they reach the end of their usefulness. To her, these machines embody not only technological integration but also repositories of our residual memories. In her video, Where the Bodies Go, she traces the journey of discarded devices, exploring the process of their rebirth. Through Room for Moulting, she employs the metaphor of ‘moulting’—a phase in certain life cycles where animals shed body parts. Adopting an archaeological approach to digital bodies, she seeks to trace their trajectory from creation to eventual demise, while also pondering the potential for renewal and circulation. The Imposter Prayers by An Laphan confronts the awkward symptoms of the imposter syndrome in the context of second-generation migratory experiences. A soliloquy about an unstable national, cultural and genetic identity, the eponymous prayers contain seemingly contradictory verses about absurdities of integration, social shapeshifting, casual racism, generational dimensions of guilt and the loss of ancestry. In a rendered moment frozen at zero gravity, the nonexistent camera circles an array of objects seemingly just thrown into the still room or swiped of a table a second earlier. The piece depicts vignettes of imaginary archives – of everyday objects in disarray and in ambiguous transitions between junk and artifact – through which notions of identity can be traced and misinterpreted. They are presented as computer-generated scenes in which real-life documents, photographs and memories have been altered and reconstructed, thereby mirroring the unreliable visual realism with behaviors of code-switching and other manipulations of the self. In step with lingering questions about ideas of nativity and the ephemeral nature of identity, the artwork also serves as companion piece to the work Intuitions about Vietnamese Death (2022), in which cinematic depictions of Vietnamese death found in war movies by Western directors are critiqued and counterbalanced. Vanessa Amoah Opoku's spatial installation Nichts als Solide takes viewers on a nightly walk through the lively, chatter-filled streets of Berlin – yet every surface is exploded into point clouds, scanned and hovering like fog or raindrops, clustering and clumping into building-, pavement-, person-shape. Consisting of two video works, Nichts als Solide and Haltung, the installation can be understood as an examination of those traces that people leave behind in their surroundings and that burn themselves into landscapes and places. A synthetic lyrical persona's monologue guides through the scanned streets – fed by an Artificial Intelligence, in turn fed and fueled by writings and poems of Afro-German poet May Ayim and Jewish lyricist Mascha Kaléko. Through the medium of this virtual being, the artist not only poses questions of identity, but answers them with self-empowerment, placing the statements generated by the AI and her own words in a context from which a decided stance emerges. What connects Mascha Kaléko, May Ayim and the artist apart from sharing marginalizing experiences is the ambivalence between the urban space as a space of danger, and as a space of freedom and empowerment. The video's sound is based on field recordings with contact microphones from urban spaces, transformed into ambient tracks by electronic musicians Adrian Diraque and Markus Dröse. In their short film Außer Männern hatten wir nichts zu verlieren, Leila Fatima Keita and Hanna Hocker go in search of feminisms through the ages. When they find an old cassette, their cinematic search begins - until then, the two feminist filmmakers have only known their predecessors from books. The first women‘s bookshop opened in Munich in 1975: Men were not allowed in there. During a conversation with the owners, it becomes clear that they have not lost their fighting spirit even after all these years. We are too well-behaved for them, but can they also learn something from us? What divides us, what unites us? The young filmmakers embark on a journey to the beginnings of the Munich women‘s movement in the 1970s. They come across archive footage of the opening of Germany‘s first women‘s bookstore, Lillemors, which was founded by six women in Munich on November 3, 1975. The directors decide to make the bookshop and its co-founder Monika Neuser the starting point for their film. The focus is on one of the first safe spaces for women in the area, where men are not allowed to enter.Lillemors becomes an important meeting place for emancipated women from all over Munich - a place for exchange, networking and feminist action. In conversation with Sabine Holm, one of the founders of Lillemors, as well as the later operators Andrea Gollbach and Ursula Neubauer, the filmmakers explore the continuing relevance of many feminist issues of the older generation, but also the existing differences between the generations. Please note the room can be viewed from the outside 24/7, but can only be entered on event days. Next events on 2.4.2025 and 6.4.2025. Unfortunately, the exhibition space is not barrier-free.