Dear Tom

20 minutes with Melik Tutuncu

Melik Tutuncu, Chicago-based architect of Turkish origin, talks about his grand-mother, Safiye Behar, a Jewish marxist feminist who had a 30 year-long affair with Mustapha Kemal Atatürk and influenced many of the reforms he was implementing in the 1920's, which founded modern Turkey.

Brothers

Thinly disguised account of the relationship between radical black activist Angela Davis and Black Panther and prison inmate George Jackson, who was one of those killed in a failed 1971 prison breakout.

Wandering Marxwards

A political and poetic wondering/wandering about the relevance and context of re-reading Marx 150 years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto

The Three Failures

A fairy tale about communism, social-democracy, and capitalism. (The sequel to Wandering Marxwards)

Psychics II : Janet Jelet / 1371 North Milwaukee Ave, Chicago

A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance.

Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory started as an investigation of the link between politics and chocolate, at the Karl Marx Confectionary Factory in Kiev, Ukraine. Since access to the factory was denied, the project had to be re-considered, re-invented or re-enacted. Mostly made of archival footage and re-enacted performances based on the company's website, the film merges what was left of the initial idea with what has been collected and realized instead. It borrows from the genres of video art, 'Man on the street' interview, direct address, corporate film, essay, and music video, without legitimately belonging to any of them. The film unravels as a reflection on its own failure, and yet keeps on investigating what has always been at stake: the shift from public to private property (and from analog to digital technology), dialectics of permanence and change, language as a mirror of ideology, and post-Soviet oligarchy culture.

The Swap

The Swap is the third chapter of the PolEc Trilogy, comprising Wandering Marxwards (1998) and The Three Failures (2006). It features the same character as in the previous episodes, but now reduced to a lost, exhausted soul roaming Shanghai's cityscape from the remotest periphery to the financial district. Another narrative, spoken this one, takes us to September 2008, as gigantic bailouts put the financial system on life support instead of letting it collapse, thus seizing our reality and replacing it with a fiction tailored for the situation. These two streams end up meeting on a Shanghai dancefloor, where unresolved contradictions can finally be performed.

Psychics IV : Sally Degener-Porter/ De Appel, Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 10, Amsterdam

A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance. In this particular case, the psychic is looking at the past of the De Appel building, which used to accommodate the Jewish bank Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co.

Psychics III : Frans Dupont / Rooseum, Gasverksgatan 22, Malmoe

A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance. In this particular case, Frans Dupont is looking at the past but also at the future of Rooseum - Center for contemporary art in Malmoe, which was on the verge of being shut down while Blum was artist-in-residence.

Faktories und Felder

A speculative biography of Joseph Otmar Hefter, a Jewish territorialist active in the 1930's and who disappeared from public attention soon after. What begins as an investigation of Hefter's elusive life between the eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, New York, and Mexico, soons turns into questioning the biography genre - the stuff a life is made of, and the ways to make sense of it.

Capri in Tangerang (Her Sneakers)

A sequel to My Sneakers - the 2001 video where Blum traveled his Nike sneakers back to Indonesia to figure out where they really came from. This time, it's the artist's daughter's shoes that prompt him to return to Jakarta. While echoing My Sneakers and its investigative drive, Capri unravels as a reflection on time passing and the dialectics of permanence and change. Factories are still producing sneakers, but the world around has completely changed…

Old Boys and Toys

An ethnographic trip to American suburbia, recorded in a single shot. Every year, in the days prior to the opening of the World Toy Show in a Chicago suburb, toy collectors and dealers rent rooms at the local Holiday Inn and leave their doors open...

17 Aandbloem Street

A neighbourhood investigation centered around a house in Cape Town. Current and former tenants, neighbours, a homeless man in a wheelchair, an architect, a former top-model and a flower seller are among these who provide stories about the house, its surroundings and the hyper-local power dynamics - 10 years after the fall of the apartheid regime.

Psychics I : Melanie Perfect / 17 Aandbloem Street, Cape Town

A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance.

Oriental Dream

Orientalism breathlessly revisited, or a post-Ottoman tribute to silent slapstick comedy.

Ciao Ghatoul

Tel Aviv, 2007. A man is so annoyed by a cat's on-going meows, that he decides to abduct the cat and deport it to the West Bank. He thus embarks on a long and complicated journey with the sole purpose of ridding himself of this unpleasant neighbour.