Michael Rakowitz

Protodispatch presents Beyond Survival, a screening program of short films and videos addressing tyrannical planetary conditions by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Chitra Ganesh, Amar Kanwar, Ana María Millán, Michael Rakowitz, and Rattana Vandy at the Francis Kite Club. The screening will be followed by an informal discussion with curators Mari Spirito and Laura Raicovich and artists Chitra Ganesh, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme*, and is produced by Protocinema.

This Protodispatch screening event brings together videos that convey forms of resistance which take us beyond survival in a multitude of forms. The selected artworks depict the regrowth of scorched lands, the exposure of dictator propaganda, fantastical potential futures, and remembering and mourning loved ones murdered in war. Included artists transform the tangible aftermaths of tyrannical acts and conditions by filming that which has been prohibited; revisiting historical events through personal, contemporary narratives; adopting the look and feel of video games and comic books; and reinventing myths and stories. In doing so, they defy rigid perspectives on survival. This screening reflects the growth of methodologies that use knowledge gained in the endurance of horrors, emphasizing the fluid, elastic, and possible, as well as revealing the potential to navigate around what seems immovable, rather than meeting it head-on. Within these works, the critical question becomes, “What grows from the ashes?”