con:err

In 2011 the Van Abbe Museum loaned Picasso’s 1943 painting Buste de Femme - made during the Nazi occupation of Paris - to the International Art Academy in Ramallah in an exhibition initiated by Khaled Hourani called Picasso in Palestine. con:err extends this project through staging an exhibition of western artists in a virtual Gaza. Adorno wrote: Cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. con:err proposes the question - how might Western art with its multifarious propositions and contestations and critiques maintain any cultural value in the face of a genocide conducted in the name of the Western economic and political project? The film reference historical apparatuses of confinement and control and narratives and phrases connected to the current situation. Using a strategy from structuralist film the soundtrack - in the form of a podcast - bears no direct relationship to the images. In the podcast two men speaking in accents of privileged entitlement are discussing a plot to gain influence over a person in power. Their speech is conducted in a “lyrical jargon” mashing corporate speak with a “poetic” turn of phrase.