On Saturday, June 23, 2012, 5 pm the artist Francis Hunger presents with curator Inke Arns the catalogue of his exhibition History has left the Building.
Francis Hunger is a storyteller of the age of information; his artistic exploration of technological and ideological history of technology centres on films by Dziga Vertov, mysterious radio signals, a ternary computer, the vast field of Soviet space travel, and the way these subjects relate to Fordist production
regimes.
The catalogue opens with a visual essay by Till Gathmann and Francis Hunger encompassing the period from 1917 to 1990 – coinciding, of course, with the beginning and the end of the Communist system in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The article by Inke Arns places Francis Hunger’s response to the historical avant-garde within a broad panorama of critical stances among Eastern European artists. An introduction to the literary aspects of Hunger’s work is provided by the dialogues from his installation Tolpa, which analyses crowd scenes in three films by Dziga Vertov, and likewise by the excerpt from his radio play The Woman who never flew into Space. The catalogue further includes photographs documenting the HMKV exhibition and detailed descriptions by Fabian Saavedra-Lara of the individual works on show.
Additionally Francis Hunger is to be found performing on Saturday and Sunday (June 23 and 24, 2012) in his installation The SETUN Conspiracy. There Hunger on his information desk answers all those questions, that visitors might have about the mysterious Soviet SETUN computer …
Book launch: History has left the Building
Saturday, June 23, 2012, 5 pm
Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmunder U, 3rd floor
Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse, D-44137 Dortmund