Featuring work by:

AES+F Osvaldo Budet Annika Eriksson Yishay Garbasz and Nikola Lutz Anna Bella Geiger Stephan Halter Jarick Jongman Betty Leirner David Medalla Tracey Moffatt Fiona Pardington Polynoid Paul Rascheja Alain Resnais Jan Svankmajer Curated by:

Rachel Rits-Volloch Adam Nankervis Leo Kuelbs

A Wake: Still Lives and Moving Images combines, video, cinema and photography in a co-mingling of media which bring the still into motion, and the motion into emotion. In the tradition of inviting the dead to a party with the living, we crowd the gallery with the conversations of flickering ghosts; a saturation of images in dialogue with one another. Reflecting upon our daily inundation by images of death, where news programs sensationalize death no less than the fictions of TV shows and feature films, “A Wake” addresses the media as the Vale of Tears, the surface between now, the past and the hereafter. The exhibition is a conversation across mediums and generations to celebrate life as well as death.

A wake is a ritual viewing of the body after death; a coming together to observe the end of time, to celebrate the transition through the vale. It is also an emergence into consciousness, as well as a consequence or result. Taking this transitional point between being and representation as our title,” A Wake” confronts us with the process and the presence of death in order to wake us up to the inevitable result of the passage of time.

The works in this show all use video, digital media, and film to address the mediation of death; where media itself becomes the vale/veil through which we pass, the translucent surface between observer and observed, between now and the hereafter. All the works in the exhibition manipulate media forms in some way: by mobilizing still images into motion, by bringing together past and present, fiction and reality, re-editing found footage, re-visiting rituals, or by re-living the horrors of war.

All cultures acknowledge the Day of the Dead. Some celebrate, others mourn, but the ineluctable culmination of life is a part of every belief system, and of every personal journey. Opening on All Saints Day, Los Dios des Muertes (The Day of the Dead), “A Wake” is a processional that is our “offerenda”, an offering to visiting souls awakened on this day every year.

A Wake: Still Lives, Moving Images is presented by Leo Kuelbs Collection and Momentum Berlin. A Wake premiered at Momentum Berlin in 2011.