We are showing three mesmerizing films by German artist Philipp Lachenmann at the light festival LJUSET.
Starting Oct 10 with SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby)and followed by AKM (Turkish Night) and DELPHI_Rationale, we will do a vaguely light-themed presentation of Lachenmann's work. The films will be shown consequentially, looping one film per month, with each video no longer than 13:20min and thusly watchable in their entirety despite the cold dark street setting.

AKM (Turkish Night) 2019

4K Digital Video, Sound, 13:20 minutes
Footage recorded in Istanbul, Turkey, in March 2018.
Finished May 2019.

A video about the cultural center AKM Atatürk Kültür Merkezi - commonly called "the opera" - recorded in Istanbul on Taksim Square, the heart of the Bosporus metropolis.
While passers-by and traffic move in the foreground, a fantastic psychedelic play of colors is developing in the empty rooms of the condemned-to-demolition and now faceless concert hall, awakening the building for a last time to a brief glittering life.
The AKM is the central symbol of the modern, secular Republic of Turkey. During the period of the Gezi protests in 2013 demonstrators made the deteriorating AKM the place of their resistance - and thus the hate object of the progressively autocratic Turkish government.
It was demolished in early 2018 to make room for a new building.
With this piece of "moving painting" AKM (Turkish Night) refers also to the color symbolism in the construction of collective images, - currently apparent in the large-scale project of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan trying to replace the previous national color Red with an Islamic Turquoise.
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The AKM concert hall was filmed in March 2018 when the façade was completely removed but the remaining architectural skeleton still standing.
Then in postproduction the AKM architecture was rebuilt in 3D and a complex choreography of light and color forms digitally inserted into the empty structure.
The interplay of light & color sequences, and an elaborate sound design, in which individual politically and historically charged spaces are manifested reflects the imaginary memory of the AKM and brings the opera - bound for wrecking - to a final sparkling performance.
References include e.g. the cinematic process of "American Night" (also called "DayForNight") from the 1930s, and Goya's etching "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos" ("The Sleep of Reason") from 1797.
Historical note:
Colors have always played an important role in Byzantium / Constantinople / Istanbul.
For example at the so-called "Nika Rebellion" in the year 532 AD, the heaviest circus unrest of late antiquity. In this insurgence the two major circus / city parties of the "Blue" (Veneti) and the "Greens" (Prasini), originally founded as ancient "fan clubs" of various charioteers, allied and initiated a rebellion against Emperor Justinian. He finally summoned the people to the Hippodrome under the pretense of reconciliation, bribed some of the "Blues" in his favor, and ordered his troops to slaughter the remaining "Blues" and "Greens" killing 30,000 people.

SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby), 2002/2008
12:30 minutes
High Definition Video HDV

A remote prison in the desert during the blue hour. The compound prepares for the night, the lights are gradually switched on. Simultaneously to the illuminating on the ground approaching aircraft lights appear in the evening sky, one after the other, slowly accumulating, hovering, floating.
The filmed prison is the California Correctional Institution (CCI) in the Mojave Desert. The CCI is one of four prisons in California providing the infamous SHU: „Security Housing Unit“ = „Level IV, but designed to provide maximum coverage“, - meaning: „Solitary Confinement“, partly as life sentence. SHU/Solitary Confinement is the most severe penalty in US American criminal law after Condemned (Death Penalty). In 1998 Amnesty International classified SHU/Solitary Confinement as „Torture“.
The prison footage was filmed in 2004. The lights in the sky are digitally composed of single airplanes arriving in flight corridors during the blue hour, filmed at the airports of Los Angeles, Frankfurt, London.
"SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby)" was partly inspired by the famous Walt Disney movie logo of "Cinderella Castle" and stars circling it. Further, its reference encompasses an eclectic line up of classic film topics from Science Fiction to War of the Worlds, but also the Roadmovie motif, Antonioni’s "Zabriskie Point", Coppola’s "Apocalypse Now", Jackson Pollock’s Drip Paintings, Van Gogh’s Arles series, and the tradition of the German Romantic landscape painting.