Dani Gal, An Elaborate Gesture of Pastness. Three films by Dani Gal, Berlin/Lausanne, 2021

Dani Gal’s films occupy a borderland where fiction and historical reconstruction mingle and where the past bears disturbing messages for the present. Focused on a series of events unfolding at the margins of our usual narratives of the Holocaust, Gal’s work challenges what we thought we know about the genocide and its legacies. In the gray zones Gal reconstructs, we find unexpected exchanges between victims and perpetrators and between the histories of Europe and Israel/Palestine. This book offers a rich and powerful introduction to Dani Gal’s uncanny and unsettling vision. (Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators and Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization)

The film trilogy An Elaborate Gesture Of Pastness [ Night and Fog (2011), As From Afar (2013), White City (2018)] is concerned with the complexities of historical accounts between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in the German / Jewish / Palestinian histories and questions our perception of supposedly conflicting historical narratives. By focusing on three historical events as undocumented ‘blind spots’ the films attempt to question binary notions of good and evil and similar preconceptions related to nation-state control over historical narratives in postcolonial and post-Holocaust context. Accompanied by visual and literary materials from Gal’s extensive research practice, the publication revolves around ethical, moral, historical and aesthetic dilemmas. Contributions by Sa’ed Atshan, Noit Banai, Sabeth Buchmann, Burcu Dogramaci, and Dani Gal, investigate cinema as an instrument for the production and reproduction of the real, dialogic versus fixed notions of history, unsettling empathy, historical trauma and the possibility of forgiveness.
At the book launch event, speakers will address the critical issues raised in the book in relation to recent debates about Holocaust remembrance, decolonialism, anti-Semitism and racism.

Begrüßung

Éva Kovács (VWI)

Podiumsgespräch

Dani Gal (Künstler, Berlin)
Sabeth Buchmann (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien)
Hanno Loewy (Jüdisches Museum Hohenems)

Im Rahmen der Veranstaltung liest Alexander Fennon Textauschnitte aus A n Elaborate Gesture of Pastness .

Anmeldung unter anmeldung@vwi.ac.at bis 18. Oktober 2021, 12:00 Uhr

Bitte beachten Sie: Es gelten die 3-G-Regeln. Zum Schutz aller Beteiligten bitten wir Sie, während der gesamten Veranstaltung eine FFP2-Maske zu tragen.

In Zusammenarbeit mit Blood Mountain Projects und der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.