“Can we call this an exhibition? A film exhibition? Is this really about showing films? Viewing film, reading film or living cinema? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say we are View-ding? (from viewing, reading and living?) »

« Viewding, a practice imposed on us by what the moving image has become in the new media far from the big screen in the dark room…we have to read images as we read books. This obliges us filmmakers to write films in a way one can read… I mean viewd them… away from the formulae-films, the recipes that have hijacked humanity from storytelling experiences and imaginaries.” (Jean-Pierre Bekolo)

Welcome To Applied Fiction! A film exhibition where filmmaker, writer and critic Jean-Pierre Bekolo radically questions and deconstructs the notions, processes and perceptions of both film- and exhibition-making. By dissecting, unpacking or dismantling the concepts of cinema and exhibition into their singular units and by displaying them, Bekolo engages in a pathological inquest, an autopsy of the arts of film- and exhibition-making. Inherent to this diagnostic process are the etymological logia (to account of/for) and pathos (experience or suffering) that might help understand what film- and exhibition-making mean in our contemporary.

Like many critical voices before him, Bekolo neither takes cinema at face value nor takes it for granted, as he questions the essence of cinema, that is to say he rummages in the being of cinema, which one could also superlatively call the quintessence of cinema. “If cinema is made of things and of people, it is important that we revisit what we make cinema with; the tools, the language and the process through which we capture and organize this second life we call cinema that we can see outside of ourselves like radiologists and that is a narrative speculation on our lives,” says Bekolo. In this process of revisiting, uncovering, turning the pot up-side-down to see what is underneath the pot, but also giving room for the pot to be used as something else other than the pot – say as a drum – Bekolo carves out a couple of theoretical concepts, bodies or questions that will each materialize in the exhibition WELCOME TO APPLIED FICTION as the installations: Motion Thinking, Filmmaker Without a Camera, Return to Sender, Cinema with Everything, Cinema in Everything, Cinema of Everything, Film Brain – The Memory, Mining for Minds, Auteur Learning, The Miracle Room.

Curated by Katharina Narbutovic and Bonaventure Ndikung

Curatorial Assistants: Lema Sikod, Lauren Moffatt

A DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program & SAVVY Contemporary Collaboration

SAVVY Contemporary (new space!)

Plantagenstraße 31

13347 Berlin-Wedding

Opening: February 10, 6pm

savvy-contemporary.com/