Museum Abteiberg is very pleased to receive the generous donation of OUTSET Germany_Switzerland, consisting of the six film productions of the KW Production Series (2018-2020). The presentation at Museum Abteiberg will develop over two episodes: an online microsite hosted on the museum’s homepage in March 2021, and a presentation within the permanent collection to take place in September 2021.
The microsite will be online 18 March – 01 April 2021 and hosted on the Museum Abteiberg website screening recent film works by Onyeka Igwe, Lin + Lam and Rachel O’Reilly.
All three works use distinctly different visual languages but speak on a series of overlapping themes and narrations: questions about the politics of archives, systems of alternative knowledge, the means and devices of documenting oral histories.
Lin + Lam will be showcasing their latest work Three Missing Letters inspired by the story of India’s lost rocket mail pioneer Stephen H. Smith. In 1934, in the seas off Saugor island, Stephen H. Smith attempted to send a total of 143 letters using a rocket. He managed to retrieve 140, but 3 were lost forever.
Onyeka Igwe’s works often incorporate video, sound, dance and voice-over narrations. A So-Called Archive consists of footage shot in two different colonial archive buildings – one in Lagos, Nigeria, and one in Bristol, United Kingdom. Igwe showcases a forensic interest in the images of the British colonial past and its institutions
INFRACTIONS is an artistic documentary in dialogue with Indigenous cultural workers in the north of Australia resisting a shale gas (fracking) frontier. Rachel O’Reilly turns the camera towards the grave threats the industry poses to local ecosystems, communities and water knowledge held in “songlines”.
The KW Production Series is a project dedicated to the moving image, initiated in 2018 by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in collaboration with OUTSET Germany_Switzerland and the Julia Stoschek Collection. It is produced by Mason Leaver-Yap, KW’s Associate Curator. The presentation at Museum Abteiberg is curated by Haris Giannouras, Assistant Curator at Museum Abteiberg.
The project is accompanied by a series of digital talks.
