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A political and poetic wondering/wandering about the relevance and context of re-reading Marx 150 years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto
The Swap is the third chapter of the PolEc Trilogy, comprising Wandering Marxwards (1998) and The Three Failures (2006). It features the same character as in the previous episodes, but now reduced to a lost, exhausted soul roaming Shanghai's cityscape from the remotest periphery to the financial district. Another narrative, spoken this one, takes us to September 2008, as gigantic bailouts put the financial system on life support instead of letting it collapse, thus seizing our reality and replacing it with a fiction tailored for the situation. These two streams end up meeting on a Shanghai dancefloor, where unresolved contradictions can finally be performed.
A fairy tale about communism, social-democracy, and capitalism. (The sequel to Wandering Marxwards)
A video-letter to Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and author of the unforgivable "Art for Dummies".
Tel Aviv, 2007. A man is so annoyed by a cat's on-going meows, that he decides to abduct the cat and deport it to the West Bank. He thus embarks on a long and complicated journey with the sole purpose of ridding himself of this unpleasant neighbour.
Montreal, 2013. Dina Mendes, artist and the daughter French criminal superstar Jacques Mesrine had from an affair in 1970, returns to Montreal and looks for her father's traces. She embarks on this search with both personal quest and artistic project in mind. The film shifts from fiction conventions to cinema-vérité, particularly in Percé, where the project reaches its momentum. In the end, Dina Mendes ends up achieving neither the personal quest nor a meaningful artistic project, caught between over-exposed facts and an impossible identification. Nonetheless, what this odd film - in which you will never see or hear Mesrine once - does achieve is to provide a Québec perspective onto a history that is so central to French popular culture.
Orientalism breathlessly revisited, or a post-Ottoman tribute to silent slapstick comedy.
Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory started as an investigation of the link between politics and chocolate, at the Karl Marx Confectionary Factory in Kiev, Ukraine. Since access to the factory was denied, the project had to be re-considered, re-invented or re-enacted. Mostly made of archival footage and re-enacted performances based on the company's website, the film merges what was left of the initial idea with what has been collected and realized instead. It borrows from the genres of video art, 'Man on the street' interview, direct address, corporate film, essay, and music video, without legitimately belonging to any of them. The film unravels as a reflection on its own failure, and yet keeps on investigating what has always been at stake: the shift from public to private property (and from analog to digital technology), dialectics of permanence and change, language as a mirror of ideology, and post-Soviet oligarchy culture.
A sequel to My Sneakers - the 2001 video where Blum traveled his Nike sneakers back to Indonesia to figure out where they really came from. This time, it's the artist's daughter's shoes that prompt him to return to Jakarta. While echoing My Sneakers and its investigative drive, Capri unravels as a reflection on time passing and the dialectics of permanence and change. Factories are still producing sneakers, but the world around has completely changed…
A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance. In this particular case, Frans Dupont is looking at the past but also at the future of Rooseum - Center for contemporary art in Malmoe, which was on the verge of being shut down while Blum was artist-in-residence.