Still Film: Photography in Motion

P. Öğrenci, Glück auf in Deutschland, 2024

Still Film: Photography in Motion

May 1 – 29, 2025
Opening Reception & Talk: May 1, 2024, 5:30 – 8:30pm | Register here
Goethe Space Toronto

Presented by the Goethe-Institut with Videoart at Midnight & Vtape

Core exhibition CONTACT Photography Festival 2025

The Goethe-Institut is collaborating with unique Berlin artist film project Videoart at Midnight to look at the creative manifestations and manipulations of photography in film and video. Pınar Öğrenci uses archival material to investigate the history and present of migrant workers in German coal-mining areas. Helena Uambembe performs her shadow image in front of an oversized 1975 photo portraying the leaders of South Africa’s factious opposition movements. Andreas Koch leads us in and out of a skilful mirrored montage of photographs from his favourite bar amidst a cacophonous voice-over on art and aging.

About the Works and the Artists

Pınar Öğrenci’s video work Glück auf in Deutschland explores the history of coal mining in the Ruhr region through black-and-white photographs from 1950-1987, examining the politics of industrial labour, migrant workers, and national identity. Using an offscreen narrative voice and archival images, she reveals the hidden stories of Turkish and Kurdish guest workers. The documentary critiques racist systemic practices while poetically illuminating the dignity of marginalized lives, drawing connections between historical labour struggles and contemporary social understanding.

Öğrenci, born in Van, Turkey, and now based in Berlin, is an artist whose work has been widely exhibited at prestigious venues including documenta fifteen, MAXXI Museum, and Gwangju Biennial. She was awarded the Villa Romana Prize 2022 and continues to have her work featured in significant exhibitions worldwide, including Venice Biennale, Biennale Matter Art Prague, Harvard Art Museum, and Museum of Arts and Crafts Hamburg.

Helena Uambembe, an interdisciplinary artist born in South Africa to Angolan parents, uses performance, photography, and printmaking to explore the history of the 32 Battalion, a South African Army unit founded in 1975, through which she examines her personal and familial history. By recreating archival imagery and inserting her own shadow against photographs of Angolan leaders, as she does in her video Can you hear me, she wrestles with painful memories of war. Her work serves as a poignant exploration of fragmented histories, weaving together complex narratives of home, identity, and collective trauma.

Uambembe, born in Pomfret, South Africa in 1994 and now living in Berlin, comes from a family history deeply intertwined with the Angolan civil war. A member of the Kutala Chopeto collective, she has received numerous prestigious awards including the DAAD Scholarship Berlin, Baloise Art Prize Basel, David Koloane Award, and Germany’s ars viva Prize 2025.

Andreas Koch’s Lass uns Freunde bleiben transforms a Berlin bar/café into its primary protagonist, capturing the venue’s essence through intimate soliloquies from its patrons about aging and contemporary culture. The piece employs what appears to be a continuous tracking shot that moves through the bar’s spaces, creating an immersive journey through reflective windows and mirrors in an endless zoom. Koch’s distinctive approach blends animated film techniques with photographic and spatial collage, turning the location into a living, breathing narrative landscape.

Koch, born in Stuttgart in 1970, studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. Beyond his visual art practice, he is the editor of art critic magazine von hundert, a book designer, and publisher of the art book publishing house permanent, receiving the art prize of Nordhorn in 2020.

Curated by Olaf Stüber & Jutta Brendemühl

Related Programming:

Free Opening Event at the Goethe Space
May 1, 2025, 5:30 – 8:30pm | Register here

7:00pm
Still Film: Photography in artist film and video, a show & tell conversation with curators Olaf Stüber of Videoart at Midnight & Jutta Brendemühl

Exhibition Hours: Wednesday – Friday, 11am – 5pm

Goethe-Institut Toronto
100 University Ave, North Tower, 2nd Floor
Toronto, ON M5J 1V6

The video works will be accompanied and contextualised by additional photographs, texts, video interviews, a curatorial essay and reading room.

Part of the Goethe focus “Still Moving” on the tension between rest and motion, safeguarding and change-making, tradition and innovation.

Follow, tag & talk to the Goethe-Institut on Instagram @goetheinstitut_toronto #GoetheTO #StillFilm & @videoartatmightnight.

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