Opening of Silver Series#10 Johan Grimonprez

Artist talk and screening

Welcome to the opening of the tenth edition of Silver Series, presenting artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat.

Featuring a selection of works spanning from the 1990s to the present, this retrospective exhibition offers insight into Grimonprez's decades-long investigation of how images actively construct political reality. He examines media spectacles and propaganda, exploring how fear circulates through images and is instrumentalized by political power.

Johan Grimonprez will be present at the opening for a conversation with Oslo-based artist Knut Åsdam. Following their discussion, we will screen a selection of his short films alongside one of his most acclaimed documentaries, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997).

Friday 21.11.25

hr. 18:00-21:00 – gratis inngang

Where

Cinema

Program

18:00 Introduction + Conversation between Johan Grimonprez and Knut Åsdam

18:50 Film program (105min)

kiss-o-drome (2016, 1min 16s)

In 1980, Judge Manuel Moralles outlawed "libidinous" kisses in the Brazilian city of Sorocaba, threatening jail time for what he called "the cinematographic kiss in which the labial mucosa come together in an unsophismable expansion of sensuality." The city's response transformed public space into one enormous kissodrome. Under military dictatorship, this act of collective desire became resistance—people kissed more than ever before, driven by curiosity and defiance. Prohibition sparked longing, and suddenly everyone wanted a taste of the unsophismable kiss. This short documents how absurd authoritarianism can accidentally catalyze the very pleasures it seeks to suppress.

Everyday Words Disappear (2016, 15min)

Five hundred years after Machiavelli declared it better for the Prince to be feared than loved, political philosopher Michael Hardt asks: what would it mean to base society on love rather than fear? In an era defined by permanent war and an industry of fear, how do we shift away from exploitation and privatization toward collective care? Hardt looks to "the commons"—not only shared natural resources but the languages and relationships we create together. Drawing on Godard's Alphaville, where the word "love" has been banned and Anna Karina must reinvent the vocabulary of feeling, Hardt suggests we need new tools to act politically. The commons become his antidote to fear-based governance, an invitation to reimagine democracy through dialogue and cooperation.

What I Will (2013, 1min)

Palestinian-Brooklynite poet Suheir Hammad delivers a powerful verse of dissent amid military parades and anti-aircraft guns in this one-minute preview of Johan Grimonprez's feature Shadow World. Based on Andrew Feinstein's exposé of the global arms trade, Hammad's poem traces a path from protest to possibility, finding a glimmer of hope within the machinery of war. Brief but electrifying, this rollercoaster fragment announces the larger project's urgent investigation into the economics of violence.

Raymond Tallis on tickling (2017, 8min)

Can you tickle yourself? British neurologist Raymond Tallis uses this simple impossibility to argue that consciousness is fundamentally relational rather than internal. If certain sensations can only be triggered by others, then Descartes had it wrong: it's not "I think, therefore I am," but rather "we dialogue, therefore we are." Johan Grimonprez illustrates Tallis's philosophy with images of a heated television debate about Syria, where two speakers violently thrust a table at each other. Like tickling, aggression requires two parties. This elegant short suggests that selfhood emerges not in isolation but through our encounters with others—whether tender or antagonistic.

Looking for Alfred (2005, 10min 49s)

Johan Grimonprez pursues Alfred Hitchcock through the master's legendary cameo appearances, creating an intricate game of doubles and mistaken identity. As Hitchcock is shadowed by doppelgängers across his films, the boundaries between director, character, and observer blur into a multi-layered reality. Grimonprez echoes Hitchcock's own suspense techniques while channeling the quiet surrealism of René Magritte, turning the director's signature walk-ons into an enigmatic meditation on presence, authorship, and the constructed nature of cinema itself. The hunter becomes the hunted in this playful deconstruction of the cinematic image.

dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, 68min)

Johan Grimonprez's genre-defying essay film traces the evolution of airplane hijacking from romantic revolutionary gesture to state-sponsored terrorism. Drawing on Don DeLillo's assertion that "what terrorists gain, novelists lose," the film weaves archival footage of 1960s skyjackings with unexpected detours through disco, fast food, and home movies. Set to David Shea's propulsive soundtrack, this prescient work examines how media spectacle and political violence became increasingly entangled, eerily anticipating the events of 9/11. Grimonprez reveals our own complicity in the appetite for disaster, exploring how terrorism found its ideal stage in the passenger plane and the television screen.

Artist bios

Johan Grimonprez

Johan Grimonprez’s work dances on the borders of theory and practice, between art and cinema, beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain to weave new pathways and stories, emphasizing a multiplicity of realities. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work depicts intimate stories that brush up against the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our collective imagination and the contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue.

Grimonprez’s artistic and curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA, New York. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Tate Modern, London; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. His feature films include »dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y« (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, selected by the Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), »Double Take« (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and »Shadow World« (2016, in combination with journalist Andrew Feinstein). Traveling the main festival circuit from the Berlinale, Tribeca to Sundance, they garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, and were also acquired by NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4.

He published several books, including » Inflight« (2000), »Looking for Alfred« (2007) and a reader titled »It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards« (2011) with contributions by Jodi Dean, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom McCarthy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Slavoj Žižek.

He lectured widely, among others at the University de Saint-Denis (Paris 8), Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics; Tate Modern; MoMA (New York); Columbia University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the Parliament of Bodies of documenta 14, and he participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

His film project (with investigative journalist Andrew Feinstein), »Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade«, was awarded a production grant from the Sundance Institute, premiered at the 2016 Tribeca IFF (New York). It went on to win the Best Documentary Feature Award at the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and premiered its US broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS in 2017.

Grimonprez’s latest feature »Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat« is Oscar® nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film and has premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Cinematic Innovation Award and further garnered the Persistence of Vision Award at SFFilm and the Audience Award at Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Knut Åsdam

Knut Åsdam is a filmmaker, artist, writer and professor of moving image at Filmkunstskolen i Kabelvåg/UiT. Åsdam studied at Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (NYC 94-95), Jan van Eyck Akademie (Maastricht, 92-94), Goldsmiths College (London, 89-92), University of Oslo and The University of Hawaii.In cinema, video, installation, sound, sculpture, drawing and photography, the main interest of Åsdam’s work is the psychological, social and economic effects of contemporary society, and the toll of everyday life upon the body and in language. The idiosyncrasy of Åsdam’s work is his attention to place, a creative use of language and narration, creating an acute sense of subjectivity and historical time through its form. Åsdam uses an open approach to filmmaking, merging documentary and fiction methods, and often shifting conventions in each film. Åsdam represented Norway at the Venice Biennale and the Istanbul Biennale, among others, and has had major solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Astrup Fearnley Museum, the Bergen Kunsthall Festival Exhibition, Kunsthalle Bern, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and FRAC Bourgogne. Rotterdam Film Festival had a special focus on Åsdam's work, retrospective programs of Åsdam's films have been shown at Tate Modern in London and International House Cinemas in Philadelphia. His work is in many public collections such as Tate Modern, the National Museum, KODE, Kunstmuseum Bern and FRAC Bourgogne.

Bildekreditering: Arlene Mejorado for IDA.