In her work, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński interweaves Black feminist theory with a research-based and process-oriented investigative practice dedicated to the conditions of Black life in the African diaspora. Kazeem-Kamiński consciously transcends clear boundaries between documentation and speculation by linking different spaces and times. The artist is presenting two films at the SCHIRN. In "The Letter" (2019, 18 min.), Kazeem-Kamiński examines the power of the archive in the formation of collective memories. Inspired by an open letter by Yaarborley Domeï, which was published in the Vienna Caricatures in October 1896, three empaths follow the traces of Yaarborley Domeï's life. The filmmaker emphasizes the violence of the archive, which attempts to suppress and erase relationships and experiences. The second film of the evening "Fleshbacks" (2021, 6 min.) is a three-part addition to "The Letter" and shows protagonists in different urban environments. Dressed in black overalls and equipped with props such as a magnifying glass, restorative tools and black leather gloves, they move through the city following an invisible call. The boundaries between Vienna and Accra, between then and now, between here and there, become blurred and ultimately obsolete.

Rudelius creates video works to address and illuminate problems she encounters. One of her key strategies is to stage scenarios that weave together verité film, cinema, video installation techniques, and pop cultural phenomena on the margins of history. Her practice addresses power and gender, focusing particularly on interpersonal relationships and vulnerabilities that arise from the human need to belong in late capitalism. With "Layers of Sentiment" (2023), the artist takes a significant step toward screenwriting. Three scenes, performed by actors, deal with different facets of everyday female power struggles - women ambivalently enmeshed in varying degrees of success and compromise. In the process, masculinity is ubiquitous, but real men are rare. A father wanders a courtyard like a ghost, and the son of an art collector - one of the so-called good men - makes an inappropriate gesture to the female artist. "It is true because I feel it" (2021) takes the speculative turn into another dimension: random couples share intimate feelings, guided by a coach trained in healing through non-intrusive touch. The act of reaching out feels totally different depending on who initiates contact. The video captures a workshop initiated by Rudelius with common people; what is potentially fictional is the way participants seek intimacy itself.

Film director, producer, and screenwriter Christin Berg's work focuses on urban spaces and remote natural areas, which she uses to examine the paradoxical states of humanity. At the Schirn, she will show her film Beyond the Now (2022, 19 min.). The work combines reflections on environmental degradation, loss of empathy, and social speechlessness in a short film format. Beyond the Now plays temporally between the now and a future, illustrating the discrepancy between the existing and a past hope. The work's point of departure is formed by panoramic landscape shots taken by drones, but which at the same time evoke memories of the romantic worship of the sublime of nature. By increasingly putting people in the picture, the film turns its focus to the traces our society leaves in nature. A scene change to a bar in which two women are performing a non-verbal performance refers to the present, in which speechlessness as well as resignation dominate the confrontation with climate change and media images of catastrophes. At the same time, the performance of the protagonists symbolizes the cycle of birth, growth, deconstruction, and death and characterizes man as a natural being.

Artist, filmmaker, and essayist Tekla Aslanishvili's work explores widespread practices of automated production and algorithmic management of global urban spaces. Aslanishvili's works operate at the intersection of infrastructural design, history, and geopolitics. At the Schirn, she presents her film "A State in a State" (2022, 47 min.); an experimental documentary that follows the construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions. The film looks at railroads as a technical realization of the fragile political borders that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Looking at historical and contemporary practices of resistance, "A State in a State" explores the potential of railroads for building a different infrastructural consciousness and for lasting transnational kinship among the people who live and work around them.

Driant Zeneli (*1983) has already twice featured in the Albanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His predominantly cinematic work is carried by a humanistic ethos that consists in the construction of social utopias and the constant failure to realize them. His most recent trilogy is about fairy-tale creatures and fabulous stories, which Zeneli has set in three historic, brutalist buildings in three Balkan cities - Pristina, Tirana and Skopje. He will also show this trilogy at the upcoming Double Feature at the SCHIRN.

Film artist Karimah Ashadu explores living and working conditions, patriarchy and notions of independence in the socio-economic and cultural context of Nigeria and West Africa. At the SCHIRN, Ashadu will show her film Plateau (2021, 30 min.), named after the Nigerian state of Jos-Plateau. The video work follows a group of miners who illegally mine tin and columbite in this region and opens a postcolonial discourse. After the end of the trade in the minerals, which was founded in colonialism, in 1985, many companies there were closed and the workers laid off. However, the knowledge acquired was passed on and independent communities formed to mine for minerals again. Plateau portrays workers, villagers and landowners reflecting on the destruction of the landscape, injustice and the dangers of tin mining. At the forefront, however, is the quest for independence through work. Ashadu thereby directs the gaze unabashedly to the beauty of the rutted landscape and creates a real image of the dangerous working conditions without moralizing.