Booklet: Metahaven – Sunrise, simulation

ENGLISH Fe e re l fre tur e n m to e

3.10–1.11 2020

SUNRISE, SIMULATION Metahaven Curator: Oscar Ramos

@rodastenkonsthall rodastenkonsthall.se

INTRODUCTION Text by Anastasiia Fedorova

Finding language for our current reality is a hybrid, non-linear, poetic process. Stories we grew up with couldn’t prepare us for it – the narrative arc, the three act structure, the words which correspond to their exact meanings are not how the current world will be narrated. Our histories, our identity, our nostalgia rest in the little gaps of our computer keyboards, in prescription medications, in the news and poetry books, in the ever-changing digital maps, in the little flash of metallic green in the lilac skies.

The multifaceted art practice of Metahaven reflects on the current rapidly shifting world and our place in history. Hometown, a two-channel digital film work from 2018 displayed at Röda Sten Konsthall is as an immersive installation, offers to dip your toes in a textured narrative of contemporary belonging – and let it flow through you.

a ride, but also a luminous liquid texture – never static, always in flux. The city shots are indisperced with animation which gleams and moves like a beautiful petrol spill or a digital landscape guided by an unknown algorithm.

Hometown offers a journey through an unknown city. Your presence, as a viewer, is gentle: floating through the streets, resting in the lush greenery by concrete fences, tracing the overhead electric cables. The city is a surface,

Hometown continues the series of “truth-futurist” films by Metahaven initiated with The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) and Information Skies. “Truth-futurism” explores the concepts of truth, law and fact

“Poetic cinema can cross-pollinate the implications between a word and an image and vice versa, and is not determinist, whereas narrative cinema steers a story in one direction and not another.

Poetic cinema can potentially appear cyclic, whereas narrative in which entropy is leading tends to feel linear. Hometown was made within a tension between poetic and narrative – there are elements of both but rather than being on either side of the division, the film contains pockets of storytelling, like lyrics and a chorus almost,” as Metahaven explains. (source: https://easteast.world/ en/posts/16)

in the post-truth era of artificially fabricated belief systems, deep fakes and fake news. The genre, created by Metahaven, studies our existence as physical, spiritual, historical and geopolitical creatures. Despite the “futurism” part, Metahaven’s work is in no way speculative fiction – rather, it expands and merges the categories of time and place, political and visual contexts to question ways we perceive the current reality and history.

Founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, Metahaven works across art, filmmaking and graphic design. The collective uses experimental storytelling to explore contemporary aesthetics and political discourse.

Locality, political geography and imagination have always been crucial to Metahaven’s work, and Hometown is no exception.

Hometown was filmed in Beirut and Kyiv and is narrated by two protagonists – Ghina and Lera – in Arabic and Russian. Even though Hometown creates and portrays a purely fictional city, the choice of these places and languages has a profound meaning in the context of contemporary politics.

The way the world is narrated today often falls into the tropes of techno-orientalism: the setting which is stereotypically Asian or

Eastern but inhabited by white Western protagonists. Hometown comprises realities, contexts and voices which are usually completely outside of the existing imagined present and futures.

It’s set on the periphery of the Eurocentric world, proving that the very notion of the periphery is redundant. It reminds us that the future will arrive first to places deemed fringes – it will arrive as indiginous wisdoms and survival strategies, as polyphonic stories which are fluid and shapeshifting.

The medium of digital film, which Metahaven has been using extensively in their practice, simultaneously carries possibilities and restrictions. The video narrative is seemingly linear and limited to how much information the human eye and brain can take in. Metahaven has pushed the genre’s boundaries with multiplescreen installations, jumpy editing and intricate work with sound and surrounding environment. It also makes one think of how the times we live in constantly test our perception limits – both in terms of intake speed and empathy. We frequently find ourselves alert yet numb, drifting through the evening news and social media feeds saturated with footage of disasters in Ukraine or Lebanon which are so close – and yet so othered. Hometown, despite its

fictitious nature, offers a possibility of tangible connection – and penetrates the numbness.

Hometown is a strikingly beautiful work in its cinematography and poetic paradoxical language.

In its nuanced, poetic, tender, frequently oxymoronic storytelling, Hometown draws from an expansive pool of references, from personal experiences to the works of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector and artist, novelist and professor Svetlana Boym. Svetana Boym’s study of the place of collective nostalgia in the 21st century feels particularly poignant – echoed as a quiet yet forceful “I return to where I never lived before”.

Hometown offers a new poetry of belonging for the times when we are mostly exiles, immigrants and refugees – if not today, then tomorrow. It is a love letter to all

the things we’ve lost and all the things we still have, and to all the things we will love but don’t know it yet. It is a love letter to our own human nature – changing and unchanged. To our efforts to relate, feel, remember, tell our stories. Like an attempt to enlarge a printed image by moving fingers across its surface. The attempt fails of course – but there is something beautiful in applying these new gestures to old stories, in trying to connect the past and the future through the fingertips.

To a forgotten city forever remembered On the very top of the deepest valley Snowcovered in the blistering warmth I return, feeling fresh after a long, hard journey I return to where I never lived before

Röda Sten Konsthall invited Anastasiia Fedorova to reflect on Metahavens artistry. Anastasiia Fedorova is a writer and curator based in London. She is a regular contributor to Dazed, i-D, GARAGE, Kaleidoscope Magazine, 032c, The Guardian and Highsnobiety among other titles.

In her writing and research, she specialises in photography and visual culture, political and social aspects of fashion and LGBTQ+ issues. In 2020, she curated ”The Real Thing”, an exhibition at London’s Fashion Space Gallery which looked at fashion bootleg as a social issue and creative language. She is also a founder of “Russian Queer Revolution”, a platform for LGBTQ+ creatives from Russia.

BIOGRAPHY Metahaven

The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design.

Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016, nominated for the 2017 European Film Awards), Hometown (2018), and Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018).

Solo exhibitions: Turnarounds, e-flux, New York (2019), Version History, ICA London (2018), Earth, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018), Hometown, Izolyatsia, Kiev (2018), Information Skies, Auto Italia, London (2016), The Sprawl, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2015), and Islands in the Cloud, MoMA PS1, New York (2013).

Group exhibitions: Ghost:2651, Bangkok (2018), the Busan Biennale (2018), the Sharjah Biennial (2017), the Gwangju Biennale (2016), Private Settings: Art after the Internet, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2014), and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013).

Recent lectures and events: “An Evening with Metahaven,” MoMA, New York (2019) and “After The Sprawl,” Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2019).

Recent publications: PSYOP: An Anthology (Koenig Books, London, 2018), and Digital Tarkovsky (Strelka Press, Moscow, 2018).

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

THE LOUNGE

2ND FLOOR

Posters

Hometown 2018 Two-channel video 31 minutes

2020 Screen print, 115 g 120Ă—120 cm Edition of 225 The posters can also be spotted at Vasagatan 16 and Nils Ericson Terminalen.

Written and directed by: Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk (Metahaven) Language: Arabic, Russian Cast: Ghina Abboud, Lera Luchenko Director of photography: Karim Ghorayeb, Yarema Malashchuk, Roman Himey Music: Mhamad A. Safa Line production: Jinane Chaaya, Tania Monakhova

HOMETOWN Transcription of the video

In a tiny village, as four countries, well-connected without phone or network, not one ship is mooring the aerodrome. In this town, world famous, and known by nobody lives a retired woman, aged five or six, who isn’t me, unless you insist.

Here is our epic. Don’t worry, it’s short. It’s a secret that everybody has heard. Before we continue, let us agree on the time: the station clock, always reliable, wrongly says it’s noon, made out of one, and two. So let us agree: it’s three.

We grew up with this! The semblance, probabilities, unlikelihood, revolving doors and mirroring walls. Favours.

Bread, milk, sugar. Self-made clothes. Self-made currency.

Grandfather is a scientist. When he picks me up from school and I’m wearing the blue jumper, he says it’s red. He holds in his hands my hands, counts the fingers on each.

How many? He draws a caterpillar, says it is a butterfly instead.

How so, granddad? You are only joking. When it rains the sun must

shine. Overcast again, daytime, syntax error. A puzzle. Laughed – Solved! The sun is hiding in moonless blue.

Now under the gaze of the satellites, between the nodes, connected underground, over ground, a crime happened: a caterpillar got murdered in cold blood. Dark purple, ink-like.

Here is where we disagree, where one and one makes three. Because I say so, because it’s me. But when one and one makes three because the law says so that’s not me!

– says who? And is such so-called law that different from a law that says that one and one makes two?

Now under the gaze of the satellites, between the nodes, connected underground, over ground, a crime happened: a caterpillar got murdered in cold blood. Dark purple, ink-like.

We grew up with the seeming, probabilities, unlikelihood, revolving doors and mirroring walls, many-sided coins, the coming and going of helicopters

from there and to there, the TV news. A printing press was forced to “close its doors.”

After school, in my hand the melting ice cream drips. Once frozen, the glacier, now unleashed tastes of fruit, the orchard, of our ancient soil, and data center heat, you choose: sunrise – simulation, nightfall – prepaid. I didn’t kill the caterpillar. It was I who killed the caterpillar. Never not intentionally.

My hometown.

To a forgotten city, forever remembered, on the very top of the deepest valley, snowcovered in the blistering warmth, I return, feeling fresh, after a long, hard journey.

I return to where I never lived before. The station clock came to standstill, it’s always the same hour.

Crumbling like sand cake, our new tomorrow is like the blackbird’s song: a solemn voice, a silent pulse of tomorrow. As inheritance, seriously, I got: the future of the ruins.

Now in the sunken city, look around. People dwell, lost, and entranced. They forgot about how children taught them what cannot be taught: a dawn of morality from within. Their children bear names of what cannot be named: Luka, of light, Nadezhda, of waiting, Alyosha, of help.

United we are, in chaos. Once frozen, the solid mass, now a river, becomes our life and washes away the memory banks of the town. Pay cut, or power cut, there is no choice: nightfall, a free-forall, unleashing vertical fire. My hometown.

Let’s agree on a place. After thinking for long, I had the idea right away: I’ll see you at dawn, where the road splits in two.

Let’s agree on a place. After thinking for long, I had the idea right away: I’ll see you at dawn, where the road splits in two.

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