Michael Blum
1966 (60 лет)Psychics I : Melanie Perfect / 17 Aandbloem Street, Cape Town
Michael Blum
A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance.
Psychics I : Melanie Perfect / 17 Aandbloem Street, Cape Town
17 Aandbloem Street
Michael Blum
A neighbourhood investigation centered around a house in Cape Town. Current and former tenants, neighbours, a homeless man in a wheelchair, an architect, a former top-model and a flower seller are among these who provide stories about the house, its surroundings and the hyper-local power dynamics - 10 years after the fall of the apartheid regime.
17 Aandbloem Street
Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory
Michael Blum
Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory started as an investigation of the link between politics and chocolate, at the Karl Marx Confectionary Factory in Kiev, Ukraine. Since access to the factory was denied, the project had to be re-considered, re-invented or re-enacted. Mostly made of archival footage and re-enacted performances based on the company's website, the film merges what was left of the initial idea with what has been collected and realized instead. It borrows from the genres of video art, 'Man on the street' interview, direct address, corporate film, essay, and music video, without legitimately belonging to any of them. The film unravels as a reflection on its own failure, and yet keeps on investigating what has always been at stake: the shift from public to private property (and from analog to digital technology), dialectics of permanence and change, language as a mirror of ideology, and post-Soviet oligarchy culture.
Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory
Old Boys and Toys
Michael Blum
An ethnographic trip to American suburbia, recorded in a single shot. Every year, in the days prior to the opening of the World Toy Show in a Chicago suburb, toy collectors and dealers rent rooms at the local Holiday Inn and leave their doors open...
Old Boys and Toys
Faktories und Felder
Michael Blum
A speculative biography of Joseph Otmar Hefter, a Jewish territorialist active in the 1930's and who disappeared from public attention soon after. What begins as an investigation of Hefter's elusive life between the eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, New York, and Mexico, soons turns into questioning the biography genre - the stuff a life is made of, and the ways to make sense of it.
Faktories und Felder
Psychics II : Janet Jelet / 1371 North Milwaukee Ave, Chicago
Michael Blum
A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance.
Psychics II : Janet Jelet / 1371 North Milwaukee Ave, Chicago
20 minutes with Melik Tutuncu
Michael Blum
Melik Tutuncu, Chicago-based architect of Turkish origin, talks about his grand-mother, Safiye Behar, a Jewish marxist feminist who had a 30 year-long affair with Mustapha Kemal Atatürk and influenced many of the reforms he was implementing in the 1920's, which founded modern Turkey.
20 minutes with Melik Tutuncu
Cavale au Canada
Michael Blum
Montreal, 2013. Dina Mendes, artist and the daughter French criminal superstar Jacques Mesrine had from an affair in 1970, returns to Montreal and looks for her father's traces. She embarks on this search with both personal quest and artistic project in mind. The film shifts from fiction conventions to cinema-vérité, particularly in Percé, where the project reaches its momentum. In the end, Dina Mendes ends up achieving neither the personal quest nor a meaningful artistic project, caught between over-exposed facts and an impossible identification. Nonetheless, what this odd film - in which you will never see or hear Mesrine once - does achieve is to provide a Québec perspective onto a history that is so central to French popular culture.
Cavale au Canada
Psychics IV : Sally Degener-Porter/ De Appel, Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 10, Amsterdam
Michael Blum
A series of psychic readings of spaces, commissioned by the artist in an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces, despite the limitations of rational discourse. The video is not edited, respecting the actual duration of the performance. In this particular case, the psychic is looking at the past of the De Appel building, which used to accommodate the Jewish bank Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co.
Psychics IV : Sally Degener-Porter/ De Appel, Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 10, Amsterdam
The Swap
Michael Blum
Michael Blum, Bake He
The Swap is the third chapter of the PolEc Trilogy, comprising Wandering Marxwards (1998) and The Three Failures (2006). It features the same character as in the previous episodes, but now reduced to a lost, exhausted soul roaming Shanghai's cityscape from the remotest periphery to the financial district. Another narrative, spoken this one, takes us to September 2008, as gigantic bailouts put the financial system on life support instead of letting it collapse, thus seizing our reality and replacing it with a fiction tailored for the situation. These two streams end up meeting on a Shanghai dancefloor, where unresolved contradictions can finally be performed.
The Swap
Ciao Ghatoul
Michael Blum
Tel Aviv, 2007. A man is so annoyed by a cat's on-going meows, that he decides to abduct the cat and deport it to the West Bank. He thus embarks on a long and complicated journey with the sole purpose of ridding himself of this unpleasant neighbour.
Ciao Ghatoul
