Flows of Capital: Bodies & Borders

Through the video essays of Ursula Biemann and Jesper Nordahl, this screening seeks to examine the relationship between co-dependent aspects of capital in the neoliberal economic model; the way in which it constitutes freedom of movement across borders for some and fixes others to specific and restricted localities.

These works look at the body, in both its collective and individualized form. With an aim to understand how fictitious capital moves, exploring how the body acts as both a conduit and accumulation strategy for flows of capital and further as a site of resistance.

These video essays attempt a new aesthetic construction that manipulates and manages seemingly dispirit forms of power/knowledge. They delve into how and by whom the biopolitical production of the subject is continually being (re)constituted for; looking at what types of ‘bodies’ capitalism requires, allowing one to scrutinize the feminization of particular labour patterns.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, theorist and curator who has in recent years produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. She is based in Zurich, Switzerland where she is a researcher at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design at HGK Zurich. Jesper Nordahl is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden and has exhibited widely throughout Europe.

This screening is programmed by Leeds based writer and artist Amy Charlesworth whose forthcoming PhD research title is: The Video Essay in Contemporary Art: Aesthetics, Geographies, Politics. Amy is also organising an exhibition featuring the work of Biemann and Nordahl at East Street Arts, Leeds in October 2009.

This screening continues an interest in the work of Ursula Biemann whose installation Sahara Chronicle 2006-2007 was recently a part of the CCA exhibition This Land is Your Land