#154: Jordan Strafer

Friday, 7 November 2025, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Jordan Strafer’s work reveals the mechanisms of power and societal dysfunction, tracing how violence and spectacle shape contemporary systems of representation. Through carefully staged, narrative environments that mix darkly satirical humor with unsettling intimacy, she interrogates how systems of justice and media shape collective memory and moral perception. Drawing on both personal history and historical events, Strafer blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, creating worlds in which truth becomes performative and unstable.

As part of a collaborative event, Fluentum – Contemporary Time-Based Art and Videoart at Midnight invite Jordan Strafer to show:

The Truth, sound piece, 3:05 min

PEP (Process Entanglement Procedure), 2019, 15:00 min
PEP is, among other things, a video about betrayal, the public nature of victimhood, and behavioral conditioning. Its narrative spreads across at least two related timelines. In the present, the video opens onto a witness testimony at a public hearing acted out by a plastic doll in glamorous closeups. Meanwhile, sequences shot to give a handheld, first-person perspective read as composed flashbacks of events described in the hearing.

SOS, 2021, 11:08 min
In the intricately made short film SOS, Jordan Strafer transports us into a realm where cinema meets tactile artistry. A homage to German Expressionism, the piece revives the era’s penchant for stark narratives and groundbreaking techniques.

PEAK HEAVEN LOVE FOREVER, 2022, 21:00 min 
Based on a true story of a small family aboard a chartered flight from London to Miami, it encloses baleful emotional deprivation within the trappings of material wealth. The ailing patriarch, becomes the stage, alternately, for ebullient musical theater and morbid fantasies.

MERCY NO NO, 2023, 6:30 min
This work continues Strafer’s exploration of American aesthetics and cinematics of legal process, carcerality and female gendered violence but notably departs stylistically from earlier works. Shot on Super 16mm, the images show three teen girls in a therapeutic boarding school dorm room. Drawing from an amalgam of the artist’s own biography with models and psychological conventions from cinema, MERCY NO NO is also a partial reconstruction of Robert Bresson’s 1962 historical drama, “The Trial of Joan of Arc”.

Jordan Strafer (*1990, Miami, USA) is an is an American artist and filmmaker who lives and works in New York and Athens. Her films and installations have been presented in solo exhibitions at institutions including The Renaissance Society, the Hammer Museum, Secession, Index, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Fluentum. Her work has also been included in major international exhibitions and festivals at venues such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the New Museum, the New York Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Strafer received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025.

The collaboration takes place in the context of Jordan Strafer’s exhibition DISSONANCE (11 SEPT – 13 DEC, 2025), curated by Raoul Klooker and Janika Jähnisch, at Fluentum, Clayallee 174, 14195 Berlin.

Fluentum – Contemporary Time-Based Art is a nonprofit, privately run institution dedicated to exhibiting, producing, and collecting contemporary art, with a special focus on time-based media such as film and video. An initiative of Berlin-based entrepreneur and collector Markus Hannebauer, Fluentum opened its exhibition space in a former military complex in Berlin in 2019. Fluentum’s aim is to elucidate the moving image’s aesthetic, political, and historical dimensions for a public audience.

pic: SOS, 2021 (film still) @ Jordan Strafer, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Heidi, Berlin