On March 30, Merv Espina presented his ongoing research project Media Encounters at the Goethe Institute in New Delhi. The project is being developed in cooperation with the documenta Institute and the Shiv Nadar Institute (Delhi).
The event centered on a screening and discussion of the legacy of the Film & Video Workshops held at the Goethe Institute, whose workshop leaders were among the most important names in German media culture, including Werner Herzog, Christoph Janetzko, Barbara Hammann, Rotraut Pape, Harun Farocki, Monika Funke Stern, Maria Vedder, Rosa von Praunheim (Holger Mischwitzky), and many others.
TNot only were geopolitical states being radically shaken and re-negotiated in the late Cold War and the early post-Soviet era of the 80s and 90s, but so were various states of art and art-making through the emergence of new technological media.The works produced through these Goethe-Institut co-productions often captured the social upheavals and turbulent politics in various locations they took place in the global majority. Credited to have produced pivotal works, even influencing key practitioners and initiating sustainable alternative film and media art scenes in their host cities, several of these works also toured festivals and institutions abroad.
The screening program was part of the ongoing Media Encounters research project, which led to the restoration of some of these works.
Merv Espina is an artist and researcher whose practice explores the cavities of systemic distortions and historical aberrations in media, knowledge, and cultural production, and examines the networks and organisms they have created. Since 2022, his ongoing research project Media Encounters has been supported by the documenta Institut with the documenta archiv and the Goethe-Institut headquarters in Munich.
See this link for a video of a past event at the TRACES research station in which Merv Espina and Regina Wyrwoll present and discuss the project:
More information about the event at the Goethe-Institut: