The Responsive Body

In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so called “green border” between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are trapped in a geopolitical crisis cynically engineered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. In an attempt to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Pawns in this hidden war, the lives of Julia, a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life, Jan, a young border guard, and a Syrian family intertwine.

Operation Danube was the cover name for the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968. The fleet of Polish tanks which arrive to liberate their neighbor, ostensibly threatened by a counter-revolution, includes the old tank nicknamed Ladybird, which is the last to leave the barracks.

Obese 12-year-old Wojtek is ashamed of himself and his mother, who runs a rundown grocery. On a bad hair day, the boy rebels against his mother, but instead of making her change, he humiliates her.

Stories of three women struggling with alcohol. Dorota is a great prosecutor. Using her immunity, she tries to avoid responsibility for her offenses committed under the influence of alcohol. Her husband, a famous politician, helps her keep the problem secret and rescues her from many troubles but he slowly loses patience. A respected children surgeon Teresa has lost her family due to drinking problem, all she is left with is her job at the hospital where she is the main doctor. The situation goes out of control when the woman comes drunk to the hospital. A student, Magda, likes to party hard and because she is a good student and has a great job, no-one opposes that. At one moment, the girl loses control. A tragedy happens.

Jola lives in Podlasie, near the border with Belarus. Her son Marek works in the Border Guard and combs the forests looking for illegal immigrants. Jola is a taxi driver and does not want to interfere, but one day a car breakdown will force her to confront her own beliefs.

Fed up with pandemics, quarantines and news about ecological disasters, worried about their own uncertain future and the fate of the world, a group of high school students are invited by Kamil, a millionaire's son, to a party at his father's seaside residance.

Months after disappearance, the mother of a missing daughter begins her own increasingly irrational investigation.

A normal day for Kuba takes a strange turn when his uncle kidnaps him and forces him to join an eccentric group of conspiracy theorists.

Teenage Mila's suicide attempt is interrupted by a young refugee who fights for survival at all costs.

The video installation „Een gebeuren“ is based on Ben d’Armagnac’s performance of the same name, which took place in Amsterdam on 14th June 1975. D’Armagnac occupied a glass cube with the dimensions of about 2x1x1 metres, painted white from the inside, together with about 2,000 freshly hatched flies; he began to scrape off the paint centimetre by centimetre in order to at least partially reveal the cube’s inside for the spectators. Gufler reconstructed d’Armagnac’s performance based on rudimentary documented material and conversations with d’Armagnac’s partner Louwrien Wijers. In his own version of “een gebeuren,” Gufler captures the events with a GoPro camera. Instead of documenting the slow appearance of a person behind a white surface the video shows the diligent process of laying bare and opening up from an inside perspective – an action, which Gufler completes by releasing the flies at the end of the performance and by which he also upgrades d’Armagnac’s own performance.

Philipp Gufler's video installation "Projektion auf die Krise (Gauweilereien in Munich)" provides a kaleidoscopic look back at the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in Germany in the 1980s - a time when Munich's repressive policy against homosexuals reached its peak. The work brings together newspaper articles, posters, photos and press reports from this period. The historical material from the 1980s is commented on by artists.

In 2002, Lana Kaiser became well known in the first season of the German version of the Idol television franchise. She was born in 1985 and went by her birth name Daniel Küblböck. At only 17 years old she polarised the audience with her androgynous appearance and open bisexuality. On September 9th 2018, Lana disappeared from a cruise ship on her way to North America. Most media outlets and the majority of the public didn‘t consider calling her by her chosen name, Lana Kaiser. Philipp Gufler's video installation is a personal portrait of the singer and entertainer.

In his video installation Philipp Gufler is carrying on his engagement with political, artistic and social movements. In this work, Gufler focuses on the Munich based performance artist Rabe Perplexum, imitating or subverting the stylistic conventions characteristic of the 1980s. The video performance is derived from archival research and includes the original props and costumes used by Perplexum.

Mania’s hysterical mother leaves the little girl at her aunt’s in the countryside. On her lonely summer holiday, Mania makes friends with a hen. The girl stages a rebellion when she realises why her aunt keeps chickens.