In accordance with Kelly Kirsten Jones’s forthcoming project, Plinths for the People, this screening program glimpses at the auras and complexities around what we broadly consider as the monuments: from Nazi architectures, confederate monuments, to landmark buildings with a scandalous past. Some are structures erected to commemorate or to serve historic moments; others are significant public projects that, upon completion, involuntarily become constant reminders of their own being and their permanent space-making. As humans, we personify the stones and the bronze, which have a material existence much longer than our lives. We consider these materials a witness to our histories, complicit in our violence, a substitute for our memories, a signifier of our oblivion. Knowing full well the powerlessness of individual vis-a-vis public projects that take generations to uphold, the artists behind these works deploy various artistic tactics to highlight the brutality of the monuments, to question and to cope with their presence, and to ponder on the possibility of unmaking them.

Curated by Nicky Ni

Alexander Kluge & Peter Schamoni (DE), Brutality in Stone, 1961. Digital format, b&w, sound, 10:42 mins.

In his experimental short film Brutalitaet in Stein (Brutality in Stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime’s politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi period are confronted with equally anti-human national-socialist language as a voice-over. (UbuWeb)

Sabine Gruffat (US), Take It Down, 2019. Digital format, color, sound, 12:37 mins.

This film looks to North Carolina to describe the cultural fissure that runs through the South, a legacy of the Civil War. In the context of the divisive Trump presidency and the increasing visibility of white supremacist activism, these Confederate memorials have become sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives. (Video Data Bank)

Alona Weiss (IL/US), Kiss A Statue, 2016. Digital format, color, sound, 5:00 mins.

A neglected Brutalist public monument is repurposed as a platform for an Acro-Yoga session. The gymnastic practice requires a power balance based on contact, communication, and trust. As the acrobats blend with the geometrical shapes and outlines of the monument, a triangular relationship is formed: a relationship between the couple and their intimate strive to balance their bodies, and between the surface of the structure, that dictates and challenges their movements with its crooked angled surfaces. The sculpture was built in l968 at the outskirts of

Arad in Israel, by sculptor Yigal Tumarkin, an artist best known for building war monuments and large-scale public artworks around Israel. (Courtesy of the artist)

Julia Meltzer, David Thorne. Take into the air my quiet breath, 2007. Digital format, color, sound, 16:22 mins.

In 1966, the Syrian government’s Ministry of Endowments solicited plans for a building to replace a 14th-century Mamluk mosque in Martyr’s Square in the center of Damascus. A young architect proposed a design for a 5-star hotel and new mosque. In 1971, his plans were scrapped. In 1982, a building began to be built. Hospital? Parking garage? Military housing? The project–now called the Basel al-Asad Center–has been the subject of much rumor and speculation. As of 2007, the building remains unfinished. In this documentary video, an architect recounts the chronicle of the building and considers its possible future. (Video Data Bank)

Yuan Zheng (CN), A Failed Flight: Jiuquan Airport, 2018. Digital format, color, silent, 13:04 mins.

In 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (also known as KAL 007), a flight with 200-odd passengers that deviated from its original route from New York to Seoul and flew into Soviet territory, was shot down by Soviet fighter jets. In the wake of the accident, the US government decided to expand the Global Positioning System (GPS) from exclusive military use to civilian purposes. A Failed Flight: Jiuquan Airport recorded how a drone took off and crashed in the former Jiuquan Airport of China-Soviet Civilian Airlines (CSCA) due to the loss of GPS signals. CSCA, announcing that it would open a business in 1950, was China’s first joint venture before China’s economic reform and opening-up. Then in 1954 when Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, then the first Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953–1964) paid a visit to China, CSCA was transformed into a wholly-owned company in China, and finally became a historical bygone as China and the Soviet Union fell afoul of each other at the end of the 1950s. However, its relics from its time as CSCA Jiuquan Airport, one of the earliest airports to be put into use in Northwest China, has now become the first airport-oriented Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the Municipal Level in the country. (Courtesy of the artist)

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Tags: 062, 062Gallery, Alexander Kluge, Alona Weiss, Bridgeport, Chicago, David Thorne, Julia Meltzer, Nicky Ni, Peter Schamoni, Sabine Gruffat