It’s not about nothing

In the organizer's words:

How do images make social and political realities tangible? What knowledge do they convey? And how are they themselves involved in the production of reality? The exhibition It's not about nothing presents cinematic and photographic works that use documentary means to question the visible. They take us to different places: a Nazi fortress in the south of France or a tomato plantation in Apulia, a prefabricated housing estate in Halle or the interior of the Statue of Liberty in New York, a publishing house in Sarajevo or a square in Bratislava. They tell of war and exile, of traces of history in the present, of systems of order and media events, of struggles for visibility and of moments of powerlessness and solidarity. In their works, the artists combine their own footage, archive and media images and quotes from film history to create multi-layered narratives.

In two episodes, the exhibition shows works from the GfZK collection, invited artistic positions and diploma presentations. Between July and October, the examination of the documentary will be expanded to include works that deal with image archives, among other things. The exhibition title It's not about nothing is borrowed from a collage by Maya Schweizer. In it, she treats words in a similar way to images, cutting them up and pasting them over and placing them in different contexts. Inspired by cinematic strategies, the exhibition itself becomes a form of montage. References are created between the individual works, but also breaks and empty spaces that offer visitors room for associations.