Artists' Film Biennial 2014: Christian Jankowski Programme 3: Believe Me + Q&A

This three-part retrospective programme offers a generous glimpse at Jankowski’s films, presenting a selection of work charting a period of over years twenty years from 1992 to the present. Each programme is structured around a theme, defining a distinct strand of his practice.

The final programme, Believe Me, takes a focused look at belief structures, in particular those of the art world. Jankowski’s Telemistica, 1999, sees a host of TV psychics advise the artist on his participation in the 2009 Venice Biennale. The recent Heavy Weight History, 2013, takes the form of a television sports report. A group of Eastern European weight lifters take up the challenge of attempting to lift monuments symbolic of the region's past.

The screening is followed by a Q&A with artist Christian Jankowski and ICA Associate Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image Steven Cairns.

Programme 3: Believe Me

16-mm Mystery, 2004, 35mm transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 5 min
The Hunt, 1992, SD video, colour, sound, 1 min 11 sec
Telemistica, 1999, SD video, colour, sound, 22 min 8 sec
The Holy Artwork, 2001, SD video, colour, sound 2001, 15 min 52 sec
No One Better Than You, 2004, SD video, colour, sound, 3 min 1sec
Heavy Weight History, 2013, HD video, colour, sound, 25 min 46 sec
Der Malteser Blick, 2014, HD video, colour, sound, 1 min 49 sec

Total duration: 76 min + 30 min Q&A

Curated by Steven Cairns, ICA Associate Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image.

Since the early 1990s, German artist Christian Jankowski has tested the boundaries between high art and mass-culture. Often co-opting the space of commercial television and cinema, he continuously subverts and pokes fun at the role of mass culture in the everyday, paralleling the structure of the art world with that of organised religion or the cult of the celebrity.

Christian Jankowski Programme

Over three evenings this programme offers different perspectives on Jankowski’s expansive practice, giving an overview of his filmic influences and interests.

Programme 1: Reframed - 4 July, 8pm
Programme 2: Learning the Absurd - 5 July, 9pm
Programme 3: Believe Me + Q&A - 6 July, 9pm

Christian Jankowski (b. 1968, Göttingen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include “Heavy Weight History”, Lisson Gallery, London (2014); “Heavy Weight History”, CCA Tel Aviv (2014) and Wasser, Käse, Feuer. Christian Jankowski. “25 Editionen und ein anonymes Original” Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition, Berlin (2014). He has participated in numerous group shows including “Tears and Politics: Works by Phil Collins and Christian Jankowski”, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2014); “Room Service”, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2014); “Real Emotions: Thinking in Film”, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014) and “Things we discover alone (Independent Learning)”, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (2014).