#26: Anja Kirschner & David Panos

Anja Kirschner’s and David Panos’ long-form films and installations collide popular culture references, historical research and literary tropes. Their work often involves amateurs, actors and specialists from other disciplines in the creation of speculative histories and spectacular fantasies that and interrogate social reality and the relation of art to class power.

Anja Kirschner and David Panos present:

The Empty Plan, 2010, 78:00 min
Shifting between documentary, historical reconstruction and melodrama, The Empty Plan interrogates the relationship between theory and practice in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht. The film contrasts scenes from Brecht’s exile in Los Angeles – 1941 to 1947 – with productions of his 1931 play The Mother in the late Weimar Republic, New Deal America and post-war East Germany, exploring different modes of performance and their relation to changing historical and political circumstances.

The title of the film is taken from Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, an unfinished theoretical work written during his exile, which considers the possibilities of ‘committed art’ and its practical, theoretical and formal limits at a time when revolutionary mass movements had been defeated and theatre was supplanted by Hollywood cinema as the dominant form of popular entertainment.

Through the figures of Brecht, his collaborator Ruth Berlau and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, the film reflects on conflicting personal, artistic and political ambitions, raising questions about the nature of art and the unrealised dream of its supersession through revolutionary practice.

 

Anja Kirschner (b. 1977 in Munich, Germany) and David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens, Greek) live and work in London. Their long-form narrative films collide popular culture references, historical research and literary tropes, and address contemporary aesthetic, social and political questions. In recent years, Kirschner and Panos have established themselves internationally, taking a significant position in artist video and were awarded the 2011 Jarman Award. Most recently their work has been exhibited in locations including: Artist Space, New York (2012), Liverpool Biennial (2012), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2011) and Kunsthall Oslo (2011).

Anja Kirschner & David Panos’ web site: www.kirschner-panos.info