Mikhail Karikis

Xenon

2011 | 23:31 | 16:9 | stereo | HD

December 18 2015 – January 7 2016

Synopsis

Xenon opens with a vision of a zombie beating a drum, the scene shifts to a blistering figure in a basement. Meanwhile, in an austere office upstairs, the unusual absence of a colleague (who haunts the film in the figure of the zombie)  trigger unlikely reactions in seven characters working in the claustrophobic routine of an austere office. Yearning to overcome their oppressive circumstances and pursuing the impossible, each character enters an imaginary space where s/he battles with self-censorship, frustration, high aspirations and failure. The bare banality and bleak automation in the office are juxtaposed with striking dream-like sequences staging each character’s quest, including an office worker’s attempt to flee from his chair, the recitation of the Declaration of Human Rights from memory and an encounter with the Ferryman of Death.

The film Xenon is based on an ambitious performance project entitled Xenon: an exploded opera. It is a critical political allegory reflecting on the global economic upheavals post-2008 and the state of human rights, and explores the politics of work, notions of censorship and freedom of speech. The piece is set in a fictional professional context of an office and explores notions of freedom of expression and self-censorship, asking ‘under what conditions of pressure do we forget our human rights?’

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood…

Article 23: (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment; (2) everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work; (3) everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection; (4) everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24: Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25: (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control… [read the whole document here].

Credits

Written & composed by: Mikhail Karikis
Directed & edited by: David Bickerstaff & Mikhail Karikis
Costume and sets by: Mikhail Karikis
Produced by: Mikhail Karikis & David Bickerstaff
Second Camera: Uriel Orlow
Cast: Maurice Causey, Amy Cunningham, E.laine, Conall Gleeson, juice, Mikhail Karikis, Jade Pybus, Monica Ross
Funded by: Art Council England
Support in kind by: University of Brighton

Mikhail Karikis

Mikhail Karikis (b.1975, Thessaloniki, Greece) studied architecture at the Bartlett School before completing an MA and PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art. He lives and works in London. Selected solo and group exhibitions include British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, UK; Art in the Age of Energy and Raw Material, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Holland (both 2015); Listening, Hayward Touring, UK (2014-15); 19th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Inside, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Assembly, Tate Britain, London, UK (all 2014); Aquatopia, Tate St. Ives and Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2013-14); SeaWomen, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2013); Manifesta 9, Belgium (2012); and the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011). A more detailed cv can be found here.

http://www.mikhailkarikis.com/

The Work Quartet

Karikis began the Work Quartet in 2010. Each work in the series explores similar issues; the relationships between voice and specific communities, between subjects and work contexts and the possibility of alternative modes of organisation, of a new political imaginary. The series is made up of: Xenon (2011) – exploring frustration, self-censorship and sense of failure in office work environments; Sounds from Beneath (2011) – a collaboration with a Kentish miners’ choir that bring back to life an abandoned colliery by collectively recalling, vocalizing and singing the sounds and noises of their former place of work; SeaWomen (2012) – a body of works focused on a community of Korean female fishers and on their specific vocal practice; and Children of Unquiet (2014) – a collaboration with a group of 45 children, aged between 5 and 12 years old from the Devil’s Valley region of Tuscany, Italy, in which the children ‘takeover’ an abandoned industrial village, the children’s speculative and playful interventions challenge narratives of a failed human project and evoking different possible, desired or imagined futures.

Mikhail Karikis on The Work Quartet – from an interview with Digicult

“On an emotional level, the series suggests a sort of progression. Xenon expresses the kind of state of mind I was in when I made it. I felt trapped. It was less than ten years after 9/11, in a period were political changes were happening and neo-liberalism in UK and Europe was celebrated, before the Occupy Movement and the turbulent student protests in the UK and across Europe. So the main question was: how can we express ourselves if the power of political speech and language has been hollowed out?

“In this regard, Sounds from Beneath was a kind of solution (perhaps ‘solution’ is not the right word here, but it was a kind of solution in terms of my practice) where I explored the possibility of creating a political vocal gesture that was neither propaganda nor sloganistic speech. The miners vocalize something that is connected to the specificities of what they did, their memory and community, and at the same time they reclaim the political agency they were denied in their protests and strikes. Their abstract vocal acts are specific to their community and go beyond predictable political speech. At that point, something happened in my practice and in my thinking. Yet, I was still engaging with memory – with something that had happened in the past and was reactivated now in the form of recalling.

“This is the reason why SeaWomen had to happen: the project is about a disappearing but still active, independent, self-sufficient and dynamic community of women subverting expectations of the male-dominated context they exist in. SeaWomen was the first project that marked a change in the way I felt in terms of my agency as an artist and the way I can affect the world around me. I think of Xenon as a sort of ‘toxic’ work in that it is very critical, punishing and polemical; Sound from Beneath is a re-collective lament, while SeaWomen displays dynamism – the old women’s bodies are active and powerful and represent a model of existence that gave me hope.

“So, moving to Children of Unquiet was deeply meaningful in my practice. It encapsulates this process and could not have happened four years ago. It needed the background of all the other projects and research. For the first time, I worked with children. The project poses questions about the future: what do we leave to the next generation, how do we empower them to change things? Moreover, if we talk about the film, it actually has glimpses and methodologies of all the other projects: the recalling of sounds of specific places, for example, or the acts of speech that are somehow subverted. These are elements I developed by working on the projects that preceded it.”

The full interview can be found here.

Courtesy of Mikhail Karikis, Elena Biserna and Digicult.

“What do we leave to the next generation, how do we empower them to change things?” Mikhail Karikis

Love as a political force?

“Love is an institution of revolution.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, 2009

“So love, simultaneously, is a revolutionary force and creates sustainable bonds that resist change. Hardt and Negri transpose these observations in the field of politics by asking: how is it possible to think of a political system that exists through revolution and constant change and, at the same time, creates sustainable bonds? For me this seems to be the fundamental question in relation to industrial village of Larderello in the project Children of Unquiet. There was a pioneering, innovative industry – they invented geothermal energy production – that was possible only because of change. A community was created because of that – people moved there to work, to operate the power plant. The industry did not stop changing and introduced automated technology. This shift created a fracture and disrupted the connection with the community. The industry was not able to sustain its bonds with the people that made it happen in the first place. Why was that? How is that possible? If we think through Negri and Hardt’s ideas, that change should have engaged the community so that those bonds would not have been destroyed. ‘Love is the institution of revolution” is really about this. We usually think of institutions as stable and revolution as a change, but love contains this contradictory dynamic – it is able to create both stability and change. I really stand by that.” Mikhail Karikis in an interview with Elena Biserna in Digicult.  The full interview is available here.

From Children of Unquiet, Hardt and Negri on love

Love is not a spontaneous or passive experience.

Love doesn’t just happen to us.

Love is an action…

it’s a biopolitical event realised in common.

Love is a productive force.

In love we produce a new world, a new social life.

We exist in relation to others and we constantly have the power to intervene.

Here is a puzzle about love:

it shatters the structures of the world you know and creates a new world.

In love, you gain a new body, a new being.

But love also has another, seemingly opposite face.

Love binds you in a way that feels it will last forever.

So, we are left with two notions of love that are equally unlivable.

One: that love is all about change. Two: that love admits no change.

The two faces of love pose a problem when considered in political terms.

On the one hand, a political love must be a revolutionary force…

Overthrowing norms and institutions.

On the other hand, a political love must provide mechanisms of lasting association…

And table social bonds to create enduring institutions.

Love is an institution of revolution.

A transcript from Children of Unquiet of children reading from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Commonwealth, 2009.

Simon Critchley on love as the faith of the faithless

“In a word, the institutions of secular liberal democracy simply do not sufficiently motivate their citizenry… one might go further and argue that modernity itself has had the effect of generating a motivational deficit in morality that undermines the possibility of ethical secularism.” Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding – Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, verso books, 2008, pp.7-8.

“Politics is always about nomination. It is about naming a political subjectivity and organizing politically around that name.” Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding – Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, 2008, verso books, p.103.

“The massive structural dislocations of our times can invite pessimism, even forms of active or passive nihilism… but they can also invite militancy and opitimism, an invitation for our capacity for political invention and imagination, an invitation, finally, for our ethical commitment and political resistance… It is time we made a start.” Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding – Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, 2008, verso books, p.131-2.

“If political life is to arrest a slide into demotivated cynicism, then it would seem to require a motivating and authorising faith which, while not reducible to a specific context, might be capable of forming solidarity in a locality, a site, a region… This faith of the faithless cannot have for its object anything external to the self or subject, any external, divine command, any transcendent reality.” Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 2012, verso books, p.4.

“A faith of the faithless that is an openness to love, love as giving what one does not have and receiving that over which one has no power.” Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 2012, verso books, p.7.

“[A] politics of love, in which love is understood as that act of absolute spiritual daring that attempts to eviscerate existing conceptions of identity in order that a new form of subjectivity can come into being.” Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 2012, verso books, p.12.

“For reasons that are still slightly obscure to me, but which this book begins to clarify, the question ‘how to live?’ has become the question ‘how to love?’ Love is not just a s strong as death – it is stronger.” Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 2012, verso books, p.20.

The use of sound in The Work Quartet

“Sound is our guide; it choreographs the filmic sequence, our visual experience and our attention.” Mikhail Karikis.

“A distinctive and original dimension of this body of work [The Work Quartet] is its audiovisual methodology which combines social engagement and community performances, moving image and sound installation creating immersive displays. The works in the Quartet centre on distinct auditory concepts and focus on sound as a vehicle of human memory, imagination and action. They explore the voice and communal sound-making as agents connecting people to specific sites of production, asserting human dignity and purpose through work, as well as highlighting alternative models of existence, activism and industry, evoking both past histories as well as different, probable or imagined futures.” Mikhail Karikis.

“I’m very interested in nonsense sounds because they seem to break free from the rigorous structures of language and make us think about vocal communication in a different way.” Mikhail Karikis.

Links

Artists website.

Interview with Yvette Greslé in FAD Magazine.

Interview with Elena Biserna in Digicult.

Children of Unquiet website.

Mikhail Karikis at British Art Show 8.

Interview with British Art Show 8.

The Yes Men Fix The World

The Yes Men

1’35’39”

The Yes Men

For the last 20 years, notorious activists the Yes Men have staged outrageous and hilarious hoaxes to draw international attention to the practices of corporations and governments and to the effects of these practices on individuals, communities and the environment. Armed with nothing but quick wits and thrift-store suits, these iconoclastic revolutionaries impersonate corporate officials to bluff their way into business events and government functions to expose the dangers of neo-liberal capitalism.

The Yes Men’s interventions at business events and government functions, on the internet, television, and in the streets form the basis of three feature-length documentaries, The Yes Men (2003), The Yes Men Fix The World (2009) and The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014).

The Yes Men’s work has been shown in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, and many other art exhibitions. The Yes Men are the recipients of numerous awards, including Creative Time’s Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, Grierson Documentary Award, Berlinale Panorama Audience Award, the United Nations Association Film Festival Grand Jury Award, Best Documentary Award at HBO Comedy Arts Festival, and the Audience Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. They are the authors of several books, articles, and they lecture internationally on art and social change.  These days, they are focusing all their energy on a nonprofit, the Yes Lab, and the Action Switchboard, an online platform for generating real-life direct actions in the service of social movements.

In their own words

Who are you? The Yes Men are a group who use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of big business. The stories are often both shocking and hilarious. They have been called “the Jonathan Swift of the Jackass generation” by author Naomi Klein. The Yes Men have impersonated World Trade Organization, Dow Chemical Corporation, and Bush administration spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world. They do this (a) in order to demonstrate some of the mechanisms that keep bad people and ideas in power, and (b) because it’s absurdly fun. Their main goal is to focus attention on the dangers of economic policies that place the rights of capital before the needs of people and the environment. Right now they’re focused on passing carbon emissions laws in the USA.

That sucked. How about another one? We’re The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Two guys who couldn’t hold down a job until they became representatives of Exxon, Halliburton, Dow Chemical, and the U.S. federal government. As the Yes Men, they use humor, truth and lunacy to bring media attention to the crimes of their unwilling employers. Their second film, The Yes Men Fix the World, won the audience award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the Grierson Award for Most Entertaining Documentary, and went on to become a smash box-office sensation, only just barely surpassed by Avatar. We introduce ourselves in this film, The Yes Men, directed by other people, but starring us.

Q & A continues here.

A Few Yes Men Resources

Yes Lab – “a series of brainstorms and trainings to help activist groups carry out media-getting creative actions, focused on their own campaign goals. It’s a way for social justice organizations to take advantage of all that we Yes Men have learned – not only about our own ways of doing things, but those we’ve come in contact with over the decade and a half we’ve been doing this sort of thing.”  Find out more here.

Action Switchboard – The Yes Men’s online platform where you can propose an action idea, receive Yes Lab feedback, and solicit help (and funding) from others.

Destructables – “a DIY site for projects of protest and creative dissent. Share what you know…” [here].

Electronic Frontier Foundation – “the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development.” Find out more here.

Beyond Talk – “was initially created for the sole purpose of environmental activism, especially with regards to promoting affirmative political action against climate change. Despite signs of greater consensus and urgency among major global economies of the need to tackle this problem, climate change remains a challenging global issue that requires great political will and concerted effort on the part of world leaders.”  Find out more here.

Beautiful Trouble – “a book, web toolbox and international network of artist-activist trainers whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective. A collaborative effort by 70 artist-activists-strategists and 10+ leading creative campaign organizations including the YesMen/YesLab, Ruckus Society, Other 98% and others.” Find out more here.

How David Beats Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 2009

Actipedia – an open-access, community-generated wiki to document, share, and inspire Creative Activism.

A Glossary

Cease and Desist Letter – “A cease and desist letter, also known as “infringement letter” or “demand letter,” is a document sent to an individual or business to halt purportedly unlawful activity (“cease”) and not take it up again later (“desist”). The letter may warn that if the recipient by deadlines set in the letter does not cease and desist specified conduct, or take certain actions, that party may be sued.” Source Wikipedia.

Jude Finisterra – Dow Chemical spokesperson who announced on BBC World News Dow’s acceptance of responsibility for the Bhopal disaster.

Gilda – gilded skelton used by The Yes Men in 2005 presentation to demonstrate Dow Chemical’s new risk management system.

Hank Hardy Unruh – name used by The Yes Men when speaking at the WTO conference in Finland in 2001.

Identity Correction – editing corporate press releases and presentations to make them sane.

McLibel Trial – go here.

SLAPP Suit – “A strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) is a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.” Source Wikipedia.

Yes Man – “a person of unquestioning obedience. Stooge, flunkey, flunky, follower – a person who accepts the leadership of another. Pushover.” Source The Yes Men.

One final question

What’s your favourite action, among the ones that you’ve done?  “You know the last scene in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator? Mistaken for Hitler at the border of Austria, the Jewish barber makes a speech to the soldiers waiting to start the Anschluss:

Greed has poisoned men’s souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed… Even now my voice is reaching millions… victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison people… Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you… Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

The soldiers cheer wildly and call off the Anschluss. That’s our favorite. Hunh? What do you mean, we didn’t do that?” The Yes Men.