Meanwhile, What About Socialism?
AV Festival is an international festival of contemporary art, film, and music, based in North East England. This year’s edition takes place from 27 February – 27 March 2016, and takes its title from a line in George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier: “Meanwhile, what about Socialism?”. A large number of exhibitions, screenings, performances, and events will take place at various venues across Newcastle and Gateshead, featuring artists spanning several generations from countries as diverse as the UK, France, India, Israel, South Africa, Ukraine, and Russia.
Haim Sokol presents his exhibition ‘Testimony’, departing from the memories of his father, who at the age of 11 was confined to a Jewish ghetto in Ukraine during the Second World War, to imbue material objects with collective historical memory. Claire Fontaine (an artists’ collective) introduce their notion of a ‘human strike’, a political action that involves the whole of life. In the performance concert ‘Buried Alive’, visual artist Roee Rosen creates an elaborate satire that is at once an absurd fable, a political allegory and an artifact of paranoia, narrating the story of a fictive poet who believed that Vladimir Putin had a personal vendetta against him. The films of socially-engaged British filmmaker Marc Karlin, including a landmark series shot in Nicaragua in the aftermath of revolution, will be screened alongside classic and new works from the UK, France, Ukraine, USSR, Japan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.
For more details, see the festival website.