VIDEOART AT MIDNIGHT AT BAW GARTEN | HAMBURGER BAHNHOF
For the third time in a row, Videoart at Midnight presents selected artists’ films and video works in the Berlin Art Week Garten: on a large screen, in the open air. This year’s host is the Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art.
The program showcases Videoart at Midnight’s long-standing commitment to the field of artists’ film and video in Berlin. It also references the artists’ presence at Berlin Art Week’s partner institutions in the city. For example, Jordan Strafer will open her exhibition “DISSONANCE” at Fluentum in Dahlem, and Wendi Yan will participate in the exhibition “LICHTAUS LICHTAN” curated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers at St. Matthew’s Church. Cyrill Lachauer will premiere his film “SLACK” in a collaboration between the Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art and Videoart at Midnight Productions at Babylon Cinema, accompanied by an artist talk between the filmmaker and his main protagonist, Mike Brodie, at the Berlinische Galerie.
The participating artists, most of whom will be present, have exhibited their works at Videoart at Midnight in recent years or will do so in the near future.
Admission is free, everyone is welcome.
SCREENING #1 – THU 11 SEP
8:30–9:30PM
Clément Cogitore – Elegies, 2013, 6:25 min
Hundreds of small luminous screens float above a human sea: a concert audience takes pictures with their cell phones of a scene outside the frame. Like the subtitles of an absent song, or the inner voice of an invisible narrator, verses from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies punctuate this enormous collective wave of energy redolent of a digital ceremony.
Cyrill Lachauer – Dodging Raindrops, A Separate Reality, 2017, 26:49 min
Dodging Raindrops – A Separate Reality is an episodic experimental film, in which documentary and staged scenes intertwine in a mythic-apocalyptic narrative. The film begins in Los Angeles und retraces the field trips into the Southwest assumed to have been taken by the controversial anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, one of the founders of the New Age movement. Taking up the anthropological concept of “othering”, the film casts its subjects as “others” inhabiting another side, another reality and another opposite. In doing so, Dodging Raindrops – A Separate Reality weaves a web of ostensible truths and untruths, of legends and utopias, of historic incidents and visions.
Moritz Stumm & Stefan Neuberger – Kontrolle, 2024, 16:29 min
The work cycle Kontrolle (Control) thematises the power structure between the animal as an instrument, the state authority and the citizens who are confronted with this power. The highly stylised images of training sessions with horses and dogs in police service focus on the animals themselves: sometimes calm, sometimes aggressive, then again playful but always obedient, they follow orders. The exaggeration of the images is reminiscent of the iconography of power in earlier eras and at the same time raises the question of how state power is staged today.
Simon Dybbroe Møller – Bag of Bones, 2023, 4:40 min
Bag of Bones picks up the story of the “Grauballe Man”: in 1952, a Danish peat cutter stumbled upon a two-thousand-year-old corpse in a bog, which quickly became one of the country’s most famous prehistoric discoveries. The body was so well preserved that some believed it to be a missing drunkard from the area. Using 3D scans and animations, Dybbroe Møller brings the Grauballe Man back to life and fills the room with the sound of his eerie breathing.
SCREENING #2 – FRI 12 SEP
8:30–9:30PM
Jordan Strafer – No Spank, 2024, 10:00 min
In No Spank, Jordan Strafer sets her coming-of-age story on a remote Greek island that also serves as a strict and highly regimented girls’ school. With her characteristic staging, a keen sense of the details of the era, and tense, taciturn performances, the artist unfolds a scenario in which grim frustrations, small acts of rebellion, and the subtle physical horrors of adolescence are expressed.
Raphaela Vogel – Procon, 2014, 2:46 min
Raphaela Vogel’s video installation Prokon, shows the artist in her studio in a duel with a drone. The drone’s high-pitched sound – somewhere between aggresive insect’s hum and robot beep – underscores the video’s dramatic and psychologically charged setting, which provokes moments of panic and catharsis. These states, in turn, suggest Vogel’s urge more generally to confront, appropriate and finally break out of institutionalized spaces.
Wendi Yan – Dream of Walnut Places, 2025, 10:48 min
Dream of Walnut Palaces is a CGI animation film that traces the exchange of knowledge between China and Europe in the late 18th century. It centres on the clash between epistemic visual practices and imperial imagination at the height of the Enlightenment. The story is narrated by a fictional character: a Daoist scholar who travelled to Paris in the 1780s after previously working for the Jesuits in Beijing. From his perspective, the film unfolds a historical moment on the threshold of modern science, in which Daoist metaphysics appears not as a contradiction but as an integral part of new epistemic virtues.
commissioned by THE VH AWARD, organized by Hyundai Motor Group
The screening is part of the Berlin Art Week Features exhibition LICHTAUS LICHTAN,
12 Sep 2025—4 Jan 2026, St. Matthäus Kirche at Kulturforum, Berlin.
Lucy Beech & James Richards – A Map of the Pit, 2025, 12:00 min
Combining dairy technologies, folk dance and virtuosic mime, A Map of the Pit journeys through various industrial landscapes and bodily expressions. Co-edited by Lucy Beech and James Richards with song covers of “I Want You to Know me, by white lights” and “Still They Move” by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld the film was commissioned by Tate Modern and presented as part of an event curated by James Richards and Alvin Lie.
Raphaela Vogel – Atomtheorie, 2014, part 1 (Fuge meam propinquitatem!), till 6:42 min of 13:08 min
From the daring gallop to the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and the Scholars’ Chambers, a cheeky voice emerges, proclaiming a very unique truth (in Latin):The materialist debate over the ancient theory of the atom overcomes the baroque vanitas as well as the culturally pessimistic carousel of supposedly eternal return. There is no nucleus—neither in the world nor in the poodle—but rather a downwardly open scale of countless particles yet to be discovered. You just have to shake them/yourself properly.
Dana Kavelina –Taki pejzaż (Such a Landscape), 2024, 12:00 min
Dana Kavelina’s latest film, Just Landscape, intertwines history and return—as if time itself were caught in an endless rhyme. At the film’s center is a Yiddish song about hunger, written and sung in Poland during the First World War. The song uses the metaphor of the wind as a destructive force, blowing away roofs, birds, crops, and trees, leaving a landscape of devastation in its wake. During the Holocaust, it resurfaced and took on new meaning as an expression of suffering and loss—an echo of a repeating catastrophe. In Just Landscape, the song serves as an aural and emotional anchor that resonates with themes of displacement, war, and survival.
Raphaela Vogel – Atomtheorie, 2014, part 2 (des Pudels Kern), from 12:20 min of 13:08 min
SCREENING #3 – SAT 13 SEP
8:30–9:30PM
Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, El Cristal Es Mi Piel (Glass Is My Skin), 2025, 12:23 min
In El Cristal Es Mi Piel, the famous Palacio Cristal in Madrid is reimagined as a ghost, with a skin made of glass. Aérea Negrot lends the palace her voice, reminding us how the building’s colonial history haunts its non/human visitors even today. The Cristal Palace was built for the 1887 General Exposition of the Philippines to showcase the life and culture of the inhabitants of the Philippines, a Spanish colony from the 16th century until the late 19th century. The artists’ recurring allies—mirroring stages and dense smoke—create a dialog between visibility and opacity to challenge the modern idea of excessive transparency as a violent technology of the gaze. What if the palace as ghost uses smoke to keep our gaze at a distance?
Ari Benjamin Meyers – Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut, 2024, 17:42 min
Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut is centered around Marshall Allen, world renowned free and avant-garde jazz musician and current leader of the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra, of which he has been a continual member since 1958. For this film, Ari Benjamin Meyers composed two original scores for Allen to interpret, inviting him to engage, through music, in an intimate conversation about the spontaneity of music-making, the rigors of rehearsal, and the potentiality of collaboration. The camera portrays Allen privately rehearsing a seemingly nostalgic melody in his Philadelphia residence, the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra, which has been the band’s home, rehearsal hall, and frontier of musical exploration for over five decades. On the brink of his one hundredth birthday, he interprets Meyers’ composition on the alto saxophone, and turns the occasional memory lapse into prompts for improvisation, exposing both his frail age and his brilliant virtuosity.
Azin Feizabadi – Silence of Homa, 2025, 17:17 min
In the midst of social unrest, rap-farsi artist Homa faces a creative crisis in the studio, struggling to produce a song that addresses the current climate. Overwhelmed by collective pressure and accusations of being a traitor, she angrily announces her exit from Rap in an Insta-Live broadcast. Her frustration deepens until a bird-human Djinn appears, prompting a dialogue about nihilism, rage and purpose.
Marianna Simnett – Leda was a Swan, 2025, 5:00 min
Leda Was a Swan unfolds as an enmeshment of flesh and feathers, in which an ancient violent myth is unravelled as an embodied story of pleasure. Originally commissioned as part of Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, the work combines stage and costume design, video, performance, sound and artificial intelligence, focusing on the commonly defined erotic fresco of Leda and the Swan retrieved in 2018 in the House of Leda of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
SCREENING #4 – SUN 14 SEP
8:30–9:30PM
Clemens von Wedemeyer – Bakhmut, 2023, 11:02 min
In October 2021, Clemens von Wedemeyer was invited by Mykola Ridnyi and Dana Brezhnieva to Bakhmut, Ukraine, to show his video work P.O.V (2016) in the local historical museum. In it, he edits, analyses and comments on film footage taken by Wehrmacht officer von Vietinghoff-Riesch in the winter of 1941/42, including in Bakhmut – then Artemovsk. The city was occupied by the Wehrmacht from 1941 to 1943, fought over twice, heavily destroyed and the scene of war crimes and mass murders. The demolition of the monumental avant-garde sculpture by Artyom by the sculptor Kavaleridze on the central square in 1943 was symbolic. In search of its former location, von Wedemeyer reconstructed possible points of view of the cameraman with his 16 mm camera. In this way, he shows Bakhmut as the intersection of three times – a city that today is once again being destroyed by the Russian war of aggression.
Myokla Ridnyi – The District, 2023, 20:00 min
In 2022, the northern neighbourhood of Saltivka in Kharkiv became the front line of the Russian invasion and was heavily destroyed. A tour through this ‘ghost district’ unfolds a field of tension between past and present, external and internal landscapes, facts and memories. The voiceover recalls places from the artist’s childhood and youth – places that no longer exist today.
Anna Zett – Es gibt keine Angst, 2023, 31:00 min
In the GDR Opposition Archive in Berlin, Anna Zett traces known and unknown fears of her childhood. The artist interweaves samizdat and archival footage with a stirring collage of underground music from the late GDR (composed by Matti Gajek). Video recordings by activists from the Environmental Library, the New Forum and the punk scene in East Berlin, fragments of the televised revolution, and highly condensed voices from a 1986 poetry cassette combine to create an associative and intimate narrative. In ceaseless escalation, the archive thriller leads to the second occupation of the Berlin Stasi headquarters with hunger strike in September 1990 – a political event that is barely known today despite its far-reaching consequences.
Programmed by Olaf Stüber