黑料不打烊

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014鈥�2023) is a moving image forum which takes place at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht from 9 September to 29 October 2023. It is convened from within the experimental film and video making that has emerged in direct response to the Russian war on Ukraine that began with Russia鈥檚 annexation of Crimea in 2014 and which continues to date as a full-scale invasion.  

The forum assembles 19 experimental films and videos that employ various grassroots tactics and critical approaches to counter the simplistic-sensationalist imagery pushed by social and mass media that feasts on military technologies and propagandas of the renewed imperial politics. Against the grain of such mediatic loops, the forum offers much subtler, varied, and nuanced pathways to 鈥渨atch the war鈥� altogether differently. While experimentally documenting the war from the viewpoint of living (in) it, they simultaneously resist it by foregrounding not the destruction but the resilience and agency of human and other subjects that emerge in the face of this unjustifiable, protracted emergency.

The works are constellated around several key concerns, from documenting the major humanitarian crisis and frontline destruction of Donbas鈥檚 Mariupol during its lengthy siege; to analyzing labor conditions of precarious classes under the war regime that render this war principally rooted in a class struggle; to the warfare鈥檚 interlacing of genocide with ecocide; and to queer responses to war. In part a research archive and in part a fragmented cinema, the forum inquires not only into the relationship of image-making and war but also into the larger question of the place of art in such radically trying and unjust warfare conditions. As such, the forum can be viewed as a collective 鈥渞etrospective鈥� on the current era as much as a wager on the forensic reclamations of truth and justice ahead.