not-me

To mark the final weekend of Luisa Berghammer’s exhibition not-me, Kevin presented a screening of three films that resonate with the exhibition’s inquiry into objects and their status, infrastructures, representation and regimes of visibility. The following films were screened in this order, with short breaks in between:

• We Began by Measuring Distance (2009, 19:06 min)
— Basma al-Sharif 

• Une visite au Louvre (2003, 48:56 min)
— Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet

• EXIT (Bath Iron Works, July 7-11, 2008, Bath, Maine) (2008, 41 min)
— Sharon Lockhart 

not-me examined the shifting status of objects as they move through systems of production and display. Borrowed props — contractually bound to return — enter the exhibition space without ever fully stabilising as artworks. Rather than narrating transformation, the exhibition traced drift: how objects accumulate and shed meaning as they circulate across legal, logistical, and aesthetic frameworks. 

The screening extended this field of inquiry:

We Began by Measuring Distance (2009, 19:06 min) by Basma al-Sharif unfolds through long still frames interwoven with text and sound. The act of measuring distance gradually reveals itself as political, probing how image and language attempt — and fail — to communicate history and tragedy. The film foregrounds mediation itself by shedding light on the gap between event and representation.

In Une visite au Louvre (2003, 48:56 min), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet construct a meditative passage through the Louvre, guided by Joachim Gasquet’s recollections of conversations with Cézanne. Though the film speaks extensively about painting, it does not simply celebrate masterpieces. Instead, it frames the museum as an institutional apparatus — a site where authority is produced through selection, mediation, and narration. 

The program concludes with EXIT (Bath Iron Works, July 7-11, 2008, Bath, Maine) (2008, 41:00 min) by Sharon Lockhart. Filmed in real time at the Bath Iron Works shipyard, the work observes employees as they leave the factory at the end of their shifts. Lockhart renders visible the temporal and architectural structures that organize labor. The workers pass through a transitional corridor — no longer inside the regime of production, not yet outside. EXIT references Louis Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895). 

Rather than illustrating the exhibition’s themes, the films were selected in association to them. The films operate under related conditions by working through questions of circulation, labor, and institutional structures. They share with not-me an attention to the conditions that allow objects, images, and voices to appear — and to circulate — while never fully resolving their status. 

kevinspace.org/not-me/screening