Human beings have created a world for themselves with their cities – a world in which they appear to be incompatible. In Things I Forget to Tell Myself, fragmentary video observations of a single day in New York City collide with its media myth. Based on a Constructivist play by Mayakovsky, The Bath House recalls the belief in progress of the young Soviet Union, in which individuals were essentially the building blocks of a bigger idea. 544/544 (up/down) is a cyclical synaesthetic video; the accompanying music by Hanne Darboven was composed using mathematical principles based on the calendar, and was recorded at St. Petri church. The video consists of a visual montage that follows the principles of the composition. The Experience of Fliehkraft uses digital manipulation to realise engineers’ unbounded dreams. Property speculation triggered by the Olympic Games and the backlash against it are the themes of The Fire Theft. Recognising that the city is becoming increasingly distant from human life, the artist in Vertical Demonstration performatively adapts himself to it. Conversely, in the 5-month long work Transformance, the artist remains entirely still as the architecture around her completely changes. Car Crash documents the incompatibility of humans with their deadliest invention: the automobile. In Buenos Aires Recyclers, litter on the streets is animated into fantastic new forms of life. An ironic glance is cast towards both the socialist practice of public hero worship and contemporary debates around the subject in Public Sculpture. And finally architecture itself manages to become the central protagonist in a film – in the trailer to Psycho, for example, and in variation on it, Das Badezimmer.

Things I Forget to Tell Myself, Shelly Silver, us 1988, 2 min

The Bath House, Henna-Riikka Halonen, uk 2009, 12 min
544/544 (up/down), Thomas Mohr, nl 2011, 9 min
The Experience of Fliehkraft, Till Nowak, de 2011, 3 min
The Fire Theft, Isabelle Hayeur, ca 2010, 9 min
Vertical Distraction, Dennis Feser, de 2010, 4 min
Transformance, Nina Kurtela, de 2010, 10 min
Car Crash, Paul Wong, ca 2010, 4 min
Buenos Aires Recyclers, Nikki Schuster, de 2011, 7 min
Public Sculpture, Jeremy Bailey, ca/ua 2009, 6 min
Das Badezimmer, Bjørn Melhus, de 2011, 5 min

(Image: Copyright Till Nowak / Courtesy Claus Friede*Contemporary Art)