Dropout

Series title: A-Clip II - Berlin 1998 (Episode 11)

Director: Florian Zeyfang    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Florian Zeyfang born 1965 in Stuttgart, Germany. 1987 to 1993 at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. 1997/8 at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, currently Professor for Video/Installation at the Art Academy in Umeå, Sweden. In his texts, videos and installation work, the Berlin based artist, videomaker and writer Florian Zeyfang critically looks at the connotations of a globalized world of media signs and at the consequences for the society and the individual, taking into account historic aspects of both art and political movements. His projects are conceived within different forms of the moving image: film, video, slide projection, animation. Spacious installations as well as slide series ("slow films") form an important part of his discussion of “time-based media.” Florian Zeyfang regularly takes part in exhibitions nationally and abroad, recently in Kunstverein Köln, at A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Artists Space, New York; at the 2nd Tirana Biennale, at ICA Moscow, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kunstverein Hannover, at the 6th Werkleitz Biennale in Halle and at the KW Berlin. Furthermore, the artist curates projects for institutions like CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warschau, sala rekalde in Bilbao, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the 8th Havanna Biennale, the foto festival in Houston, in the Museum for Applied Arts Wien, in the MAK Schindlerhaus in Los Angeles and the Swiss Institute in New York. Currently, Florian Zeyfang works on exhibition projects ranging between Art and experimental film (“Poor Man´s Expression”, Berlin 2006; “1,2,3 Avant-Gardes”, Warschau/Stuttgart/Bilbao 2006-2008). Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander Schmoeger are architects and live in Vienna. Since 2001 Schmidt-Colinet/Schmoeger and Florian Zeyfang have collaborated on exhibitions and projects. Together with Eugenio Valdés Figueroa they published “Pabellón Cuba,” an extensive reader on art, architecture, and film in Cuba.

Director: Piedro Sanguineti

Director: A-Clip Kollektiv

Country: Germany

Year: 1998

Synopsis: Welcome to the World Economic Forum. When one’s own productivity is replaced by consumption, the subject itself is the most important asset.

Season II (1998) A-Clip produces and distributes political short films. Shot on video and copied to 35mm, they mainly address the film-going public. Within the block of commercials, individual A-clips pop up as short (40-120 sec.) political statements on urban geographies, power and consumption. A-Clip takes a look at the capitalist city that is in the process of once again modernizing its inclusions and exclusions. Working on the imaginary of the city, on the conceivability of its usage and on the images and attributions of its residents is becoming increasingly important. On the one side, construction sites are already illuminated, large-scale consumer and service zones are planned and laid out, developed for a specific public that can be integrated and is to experience the status of the protected urban citizen – an identity-forging hologram. On the other side, the city is modernizing its lines of exclusion, installing mobile borders in the streets where police controls without suspicion and banning orders visualize and constitute subjects deemed suspicious – a constructive filter. In a reversal of this choice of a deviating object, society establishes the comforting illusion of a German society of consumption and work. A-Clip seeks to be part of a movement countering, attracting and hawking these and other ideological effects. The pre-given screw of identity and lifestyle images, the production of desire and product placement in the advertising sector are operations against which one must act on the level of creativity. We are also among those who are disappointed when arriving too late in the movie theater and missing the commercials. That is why we have chosen precisely this beloved, twilit site where commodities speak and capitalism can be observed in the way it produces the putty of buying and categorical happiness by means of continuous image transfers. A-Clip operates in a field between artistic statements, collective practice, subjective perspectives, and political editing.