The selection process for the 11th Forum Expanded programme is nearly complete. Film and video works of different lengths will once again be screened at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg and the Arsenal cinema at Potsdamer Platz. The group exhibition of additional film works will take place again in the three halls of the Akademie der Künste. The Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Embassy of Canada and silent green Kulturquartier will also each house one video installation.
The theme of this year’s Forum Expanded is “Traversing the Phantasm”. The programme sees experimental and artists’ film as a form of traversing real and imaginary territories that are manifested in (geo-)political realities and the fantastical constructs symptomatic of capitalist consumerist societies alike. The question also arises here as to what changes this type of traversing can and must trigger within us: what traces can be left behind by an art or film event? In reference to theoretician Jacques Lacan, the concept of the phantasm is reflected in numerous different ways, including in the sense of working through archives, social and political themes or collective fantasies.
Angela Melitopoulos’s four-channel video installation The Refrain thus examines the function of the refrain in marking out a territory in artistic terms. The post-war history of Okinawa and the South Korean island of Jeju established a staunch peace movement and anti-militarisation campaign along the axis between US Army bases on Japanese and Korean soil in the East China Sea, a movement in which protest songs play a significant role.