Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish claimed that writing love poems resists the conditions that don’t allow him to write love poems. In 1980, a Brazilian city under military dictatorship became one enormous kissodrome. When a judge outlawed “libidinous” kisses, people responded by kissing more than ever – an act of collective desire as political resistance. These moments from Grimonprez’s shorter works reveal how bodies and language become vehicles for refusal against systems that operate through fear. They offer glimpses of what persists even when power tries to control the most intimate gestures.

This program traces a through-line in Grimonprez’s practice: the relationship between media spectacle and political violence. What he consistently exposes is how certain practices – the arms trade, surveillance, state-sponsored terrorism – operate in what Giorgio Agamben calls a “state of exception,” where the rule of law and basic rights are suspended in the name of emergency or security. But as Agamben argues, the exception has become the rule: what was meant to be temporary crisis measures become permanent conditions. Grimonprez has spent decades using media against itself to reveal how political power instrumentalizes fear through images, making the exceptional feel necessary and inevitable.

In dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), he documents how airplane hijacking evolved from revolutionary gesture to state-sponsored terrorism, presciently exploring how media and violence became entangled years before 9/11. Shadow World (2016) penetrates the global arms trade to show how corruption isn’t a side effect but the system itself – where bribes and backroom deals determine foreign policy beyond any democratic oversight. His recent Oscar-nominated Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024) unravels how jazz was weaponized as cultural diplomacy – Louis Armstrong sent to Congo as a smokescreen while the CIA orchestrated the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

In Double Take (2009), Hitchcock’s double isn’t paranoia but prophecy: we now live in separate worlds, not because we lack information but because we inhabit entirely different information ecosystems. Grimonprez has spent decades making visible mechanisms that operate in plain sight, reminding us that this condition isn’t new – only the tools have changed. His films ask: what are we trained not to see? Whose interests does that blindness serve? And what happens when spectacle becomes indistinguishable from reality itself?

The exhibition is presented through two film programs shown on loop on different days, from Thursday to Sunday during our opening hours. You can return to see both programs with the same ticket.

SILVER SERIES#10 Johan Grimonprez is curated by Ida Kierulf and Abirami Logendran.

Screened Thursdays and Saturdays at 11:00-12:40, 13:00-14:40 and 15:00-16:40.

Screened on Fridays and Sundays at 11:00-14:40 and 14:40-17:00. Double Take is screened only at 11.

In connection with the opening of SILVER SERIES #10, Grimonprez joined us for a conversation with artist Knut Åsdam.

Johan 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.

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.

SILVER SERIES is kindly supported by Fritt Ord.

See earlier editions of SILVER SERIES