The film Rainbow’s Gravity (DE/UK 2014, 34 min) by artists Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger is a cinematic study on the Agfacolor-Neu color film stock made in Nazi Germany. Along its three layers of emulsion, the film digs deep into the escapist colorized landscape of that period and questions the material requirements, retentions, and ideological continuities of the Agfacolor palette.

The single sequences, which are projected at the original site of the production line, dismantle not only themselves but also our view accustomed to historicize. They aim to visualize what color alone does not show. The film seeks to understand both the reality of production in the darkrooms of the Agfa film factory and whether it is possible at all to face this reality within film today, in images and movements without a final, or even conciliatory, view of the past.

Mareike Bernien (Berlin) and Kerstin Schroedinger (London/Zurich) have been collaborating since 2006 to critically examine image productions in film, exhibition, and textual projects. They produce and reproduce images as a material of thought. Their films, radio plays, music, and texts are determined by a historiographical practice, questioning the means of production, historical continuities, and ideological certainties of representation. They are interested in an experimental approach to media formats, with an implicit entanglement of content and form.

Shelly Silver (New York) is an artist working with the still and moving image. Her work explores contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and the watcher and the watched. She has exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum, the London ICA, and the London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin Film Festivals.

The screening of the film Rainbow’s Gravity is part of off the record, a series of events accompanying this year’s MINI/Goethe-Institut Ludlow 38 Curatorial Residencies exhibition program. The events open further perspectives on the ongoing activities at the gallery and aim to react spontaneously to current discussions during screenings, performances, and lectures.

7pm

Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street
New York, NY 10003