Opening: 14th March, 19h
AGIT is pleased to host a weekend presentation of works by Nikhil Vettukattil. ‘DECADE’ is a culmination of their 2024 residency at AGIT, and part of the ongoing development of a series of works about historical time and the ways we narrate the recent past.
A new video and sound installation will span the two rooms, alongside works on paper. The installation uses appropriation of found footage, remixes and sampled sound recordings and music, lectures and political speeches. Intended to produce juxtapositions that might present non-linear ways to think about relations between seemingly unconnected objects and events. The exhibition will invite conversations about the source material, on how we might collectively narrate the recent past, build counter narratives, draw timelines, arrange text and images collectively, or re-examine past events in light of our current political conjuncture.
Cosmopolitical in perspective, the project nonetheless focuses on particular thematics within environmental and liberation movements, feminist and LGBTQI struggles, indigenous and decolonial histories, border politics, all drawn from existing digital archives. These will be processed in a highly subjective, tangential and fragmentary way. The intention is to make speculative connections between histories that are often viewed in isolation rather than part of an intersectional network of mutually reinforcing and global processes, sampling and editing sound and video to make abrasive and durational remixes.
PROGRAMME
Opening
Friday 14th March, 19h
DECADE (2025)
The video and sound installation will we open to the public before and after the workshop and before the screening:
Saturday 13-14h, 16-18h
Sunday 14 - 16h
Workshop & Conversation
Saturday 15th March 14h - 16h
During this session, Nikhil will be talking about the methods used to create the work to invite conversations about the source material, on how we might collectively narrate the recent past, build counter narratives, draw timelines, arrange text and images collectively, or re-examine past events in light of our current political conjuncture.
Screening: Material (2008)
Thomas Heise
Sunday 16-18h
A montage of film material from the late 1980s in the GDR to the present day in 2008, shot by Thomas Heise himself or in connection with his films, but never published. Remnants. In the theater, during Fritz Marquardt's production of Heiner Müller's "Germania Death in Berlin". The eviction of occupied houses in Mainzer Strasse. The mass demonstration on Alexanderplatz in November 1989. A residents' meeting in Hessenwinkel, a session of the newly elected People's Chamber, footage from the Brandenburg penal institution, the attack by young people from the autonomous scene on a film screening. Images of the demolition of the Palace of the Republic. Thomas Heise does not assemble his material into a historical panorama, but literally opens up a time-space, a resonance body in which sentences, images, stories and memories can resonate.
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