Narges Kalhor

Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor is forced to confront her family legacy and German bureaucracy when she seeks to remove an overly symbolic word from her name.

Lake Urmia in Northern Iran was once the largest lake in the Middle East. Human influence brought upon a devastating drought that the lake could not withstand, and today, just 5% of the original lake remains.

Forget everything you think you know about storytelling! And get ready for a very surreal trip. Narges Kalhor plunges us in a funny and deconstructed joyful apocalypse of a web of stories while following four characters who moved to Germany in order to escape the dire and dangerous political situation of their countries.

The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.

Cheekily inverted gender roles, history revisited, empowerment. The weapons here: long fingernails and AI counterimages that serve to expand the visual canon of imagined collectives. Things never archived become visible and culturally imaginable.

Iran, 16 September 2022. Mahsa Amini dies after being beaten by the morality police. Demonstrations follow, bringing together thousands of women severely repressed by the regime. Narges Kahlor explores the videos of these revolts published on social media, paying tribute to these defenders of the people armed with telephones.

In his video installation Philipp Gufler is carrying on his engagement with political, artistic and social movements. In this work, Gufler focuses on the Munich based performance artist Rabe Perplexum, imitating or subverting the stylistic conventions characteristic of the 1980s. The video performance is derived from archival research and includes the original props and costumes used by Perplexum.

The story of two sleepless women in their mid-fifties who live in completely opposite worlds. Nina files nails in an authoritarian state, while Anna is stuck in a rut in her own home. United by their insomnia and frustration with the world, one evening a hole opens up in the ground, swallowing the women along with their bed and catapulting them headfirst out the other side of the world. One wakes up in the waiting room of a government office, the other in a cell in a women's prison. Is this what a new beginning looks like?