Sommerkino im IDEAL Garten

In the organizer's words:

The summer is not over yet and after a short break we are reopening the current episode BRACHE of our exhibition project The Stories We Inhabit. Therefore we cordially invite you this Sunday, 01.09. at 8 pm to the IDEAL summer cinema! Two films will be shown: Die leere Mitte by Hito Steyerl and Violett by Laura Nitsch.

Before that, you can of course visit the exhibition again during our opening hours from 3 pm, where you can discover new interventions by the artists Mascha Fehse and Florian Hüttner. The exhibition is regularly open on Sundays from 3pm to 7pm and on Wednesdays from 4pm to 7pm.

Don't forget: There are also state elections in Saxony on September 1st: #machdeinkreuz for democracy and diversity! After the election, let's cross our fingers together in the IDEAL Garten and talk to each other about how participation can be shaped in the future.

We look forward to seeing you!

The program for the IDEAL summer cinema:

The Empty Center | Hito Steyerl | 1998 | German | 62 min.

The unbroken topicality of Die leere Mitte is evident from the very first words: "There are many ways to break through a border. There are many ways to erect new borders." Although Hito Steyerl refers to Berlin in 1998, the realization that borders are cyclically dissolved and redrawn is valid across time, both within this film and far beyond. After the fall of the Wall, much thought was given to the fallow city center, its complex history and the role it could play in the image of the new Germany. Steyerl skillfully makes connections - between the squatters of the death strip, the Mendelssohn family, the Haus Vaterland, all kinds of protests and parades as well as colonialism and acts of resistance - and repeatedly finds the same tendencies that run through history: Rejection of foreign workers*, the politics of drawing borders to one's own advantage, ideologized construction projects and the never-ending attacks on PoC. Even if the center is no longer empty - there is simply no end to it.

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and artist. She is particularly interested in media, technology and the dissemination of images. In her texts, performances and essayistic documentary films, Hito Steyerl also explores postcolonial criticism and feminist logics of representation. She always works at the interface of visual art and film as well as theory and practice.

Violett | Laura Nitsch | 2023 | English with German subtitles | 29 min.

What does a talking bundle of brushwood have to do with poverty and queerness? In the form of a cruise through historical archives from the time of socialist Red Vienna, Laura Nitsch traces the various repressions that queer/lesbian Viennese workers faced in public spaces after the introduction of the "Vagabond Law" (1885). A criminal case brought against two female workers by the Vienna Provincial Court in 1913 provides an example of stigmatization practices, but also of the potential for rebelliousness and resistance. Based on archival fragments and etymological research, found footage, animation, sound and performance form a cross-temporal counter-narrative. In the background, Saidiya Hartman's method of "critical fabulation" spins the threads. (Esther Buss)

Laura Nitsch is an artist and filmmaker living in Berlin and Vienna. In her cinematic works, she deals with social (in)justice as well as the criminalization and stigmatization of poverty and queerness.