iBerkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)Downtown Berkeley, next to the UC Berkeley campus
Campus Collaborations / Private Frontiers: Media Legacies of the Cold War
Naeem Mohaiemen, Prajakta Potnis, TJ Shin and Tiffany Sia use photography, video and installation to read today's media through the Cold War.
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You sit down under two hanging monitors and watch pairs of strangers read prompt cards, then decide whether to cooperate or betray each other. TJ Shin found his sixteen players through a Craigslist ad and set them a modified Prisoner's Dilemma, the game theory RAND developed in 1950. Randomizers keep reshuffling the footage, so it has no fixed length.
Four artists read the Cold War, 1945 to 1989, through its media, with an eye on decolonization in Asia. Naeem Mohaiemen cuts American newsreels about the Berlin Wall to a 1980 German punk song. Tiffany Sia lays text about Rupert Murdoch and satellite dishes over moving images, and Prajakta Potnis photographs a cauliflower inside a fridge.
Much of it is video built on archives and broadcasts, so budget time to sit. Entry is with the $18 gallery admission, free on first Thursdays and for under-14s, until December 13. Mohaiemen talks with curator Tausif Noor after a ticketed screening on October 29 at 7 PM.
Look for
TJ Shin, Delta
Two monitors hang from the ceiling over chairs and carpet, showing players reading game cards against white backdrops, with subtitles, as they choose to cooperate or defect.
Naeem Mohaiemen, Das Stasi Panoptikon
A four-minute video sets American propaganda newsreels about the Berlin Wall, including a man speaking at a podium crowded with microphones, to Fehlfarben's 1980 punk song Ein Jahr (Es geht voran).
Prajakta Potnis, still life
A huge cauliflower fills a refrigerator, lit from behind in warm yellow light until it swells into bulbous formations like a rock landscape.
Tiffany Sia, Scroll Figure #9
Text laid over the moving image reads "Beijing made an opportunity from Murdoch's ambitions. Private satellite dish".
Good for
- Locals Who've Seen It All
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want paintings or objects: this is video, photography and installation built on archival research.
Also at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
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Image credits
5
- Campus Collaborations / Private Frontiers: Media Legacies of the Cold WarCourtesy BAMPFA
- Rex RayCourtesy of Minnesota Street Project
- 20 Years - Anniversary ExhibitionCourtesy of Minnesota Street Project
- Isadora Gullov-Singh: Traces We HoldCourtesy of Minnesota Street Project
- Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)Cullen328 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0