Tanked

We  saw Hito Steyerl, a Berlin based filmmaker, and Rabih Mroue, a Lebanese artist, at the Tate Modern last night. Their double handed lecture was set in one of the chilly Tank galleries, a raw and almost refridgerated space built out of the previously derelict storage vats for power station oil. A very late start, unimaginative powerpoints and a 90-minute duration were challenges that my attention span was not up to meeting, unfortunately.

The essential ideas were very interesting: What happens or has happened when there is ‘remaining’ probability, after all the imaginable events have had their likelihood taken account of? Is there a space where all the impossible people or statements are able to exist? Steyerl and Mroue use some sleight of hand with storytelling, probability theory and film editing to open this spatiality, without every completely convincing.

They are both very engaging performers and artists (we particularly enjoyed Mroue’s “Pixelated Revolution” at dOCUMENTA, featuring his quietly impassioned and clear-eyed commentary on mobile-phone footage of police and army brutality, in which the user of the phone is shot while filming), but perhaps needed a collaborator with a more pedagogical style; the overall effect was of a presentation to the Tate curators for ideas for a project that had not yet been fleshed out.