Join us for a special screening of two essay films that deal with unpaid care work and plastic as two key components of capitalism. The films will be followed by a short talk by Helen Hester and an open discussion between visitors and Helen Hester, moderated by the two filmmakers Julia Haugeneder and Simon Nagy.
The event is organised by Austrian artist Julia Haugeneder on the occassion of her AiR residency in London.
FAREWELL. Or a person and a donkey know more than a person alone
Julia Haugeneder & Matteo Sanders
AT 2023, 23:00 min
The material used by a society tells us a lot about the structures of living together within it - about production processes, but also about housing and living conditions. The essay film accompanies a group of 12 people during a communal meal that, over the course of 23 minutes, turns into a collective production process of two sculptures. The images are accompanied by a narrative about synthetic materials, care work, liberation potentials, and their containment starting from the 19th century up to the present.
Invisible Hands
Lia Sudermann & Simon Nagy
AT 2021, 12:24 min
What’s the role of the camera when it comes to making invisible work visible? Working with film footage from the 60s and 70s shot by amateur filmmakers in domestic contexts, and reflecting upon their own experience as caregivers, Lia Sudermann and Simon Nagy fuse personal accounts of precarious labour during the Covid-19 pandemic with material-specific observations to search for possibilities of collectivising reproductive labor.
Julia Haugeneder was born in Vienna in 1987 and is a visual artist and filmmaker. She studied art history, theater, film and media studies and philosophy at the University of Vienna and Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL) from 2005 to 2015. In 2011, she transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and completed her studies there in 2019 - at times also at the Central Saint Martins art school in London (UK). She was nominated for the Dagmar Chobot Sculpture Prize 2020 and the Kardinal König Art Prize (2023) and received the BMKÖS Starting Scholarship for Fine Arts (2021), the AiR Chicago - Artist in Residence Lower Austria (2022) and AiR London Bkmoes (2023), among others. A residency in Athens and a solo exhibition at the Neue Galerie Graz will follow in 2024.
Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Helen is the author of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time(with Nick Srnicek, Verso, 2023), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018) and Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014). Her latest book, Post-Work: What It Is, Why it Matters, and How We Get There (co-authored with Will Stronge) is due to be published by Bloomsbury next year.
Simon Nagy is a text and media artist living and working in Vienna. As a part of various collectives, he practices artistic research with a focus on collaborative forms of text and theory production. Simon Nagy is a member of trafo.K, an office for art education and critical knowledge production, part of the artist group Schandwache, and founding member of the Pataphysical Society Vienna.
Matteo Sanders was born in Innsbruck in 1989. In 2006 he met Austrian director Barbara Albert who encouraged him to make films. Since then, he's been making his own short films, music videos and commercials. Since 2017 he has been studying directing and screenwriting at the Filmakademie Wien and did an exchange in Oslo, Norway, at Westerdals School of Arts, Communication and Technology. His shortfilm On The Edge was nominated as semifinalist at the Student Academy Awards 2023.
Lia Sudermann is a performer, media artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Vienna. She graduated from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne with a long documentary film in 2015. Since then she has created various video and multimedia works. She is a member of the art and performance collective Postmodern Talking, performer and (co-)author of numerous stage stage plays, lecture performances and Stand-Up Comedy.
