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Hello

Simon Fujiwara

This video is no longer available

Takeover: V. Screen Takeover Hello
Simon Fujiwara
2015

11 Minutes

Date
Repeat: Dec 15-16 ET

Hello explores changes in two people’s working lives: a Mexican trash picker who separates and collects recyclable materials from landfills to sell by the kilo, and a German freelance computer-animation designer working for the advertising industry in Berlin. The double interview is controlled and manipulated by a computer-generated severed hand which Maria describes as an object once discovered in the trash while working in the violent northern town of Mexicali. This CGI hand was in turn produced by Max, who was born with no arms, and sought refuge in computer-imaging as a means to operate and manipulate a digital reality.

This screening is part of Screen Takeover, the fifth chapter of the online program Takeover curated by Julian Ross for e-flux Video & Film, and unfolding in six chapters between September 22 and December 15, 2022, with the films and videos of each chapter streaming for two weeks.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Category
Film, Labor & Work, Globalization
Subject
Video Art, Computer-Generated Art, Documentary
Return to V. Screen Takeover

Simon Fujiwara (b. 1982, London) is a British-Japanese artist living and working in Berlin. The work of Simon Fujiwara offers a unique view into the mechanics of identity construction and the “industry of the individual” in contemporary life. His works emerge from a personal grappling with the contradictions of inherited racial, national, historical, and cultural values. In his most ambitious projects that range from a full reconstruction of the Anne Frank House (Hope House, 2016–18) to the “re-branding campaign” for his former high school art teacher after a nude media scandal (Joanne, 2016), Fujiwara deftly navigates culturally potent topics with enigmatic and surprising approaches that broaden conversations and avoid didacticism. Through his multiple formal strategies, Fujiwara is able to use the tools of our hyper-mediated world—from advertising to museum-making to theme park design—to hold a distorted mirror to our contemporary liberal societies possessed by spectacle, fantasy, and authenticity.

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