TELE-VISIONS

A Critical Media History of New Music on TV (1950s – 1990s).

Berlin 2019

(image © Camille Blake / BFS)
(image © Camille Blake / BFS)
(image © Camille Blake / BFS)
(image © Camille Blake / BFS)
(image © Camille Blake / BFS)
(image © Camille Blake / BFS)
(image © Camille Blake / BFS)

An archival research project and media installation featuring 250 films from over 40 TV archives around the world, presented at silent green in Berlin in the framework of MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues 2019.

News broadcasts, documentaries and portraits, concert recordings, talk shows and made-for-TV artistic formats from Europe (including the former GDR), the US, Latin America and North Africa paint a mass media image of Western art music, from the post-war period to the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain. The flickering of this mostly unknown, extensive and incomplete archive mirrors the personalities, institutions, forms and debates of the musical avant-garde as well as the cultural, political and ideological currents of the second half of the 20th century. “Tele-Visions” takes a critical long-distance look at this (self-) representation of new music on TV, a mass medium that is itself historic and in the process of disappearing.

Which historical narratives do we encounter in these archives? What is their narrators’ respective positionality? Which perspectives arise from temporal distance, not least with regard to current questions concerning diversity, gender inequality, intersectionality, and coloniality? How does the development of the musical avant-garde relate to the societal fault lines of recent history, from classicism, sexism and racism to epistemic and aesthetic exclusion? In what ways do these fault lines shape the field of contemporary music to this day? In other words, what is the history of the (musical) present?

Tele-Visions presents over 200 hours of moving image in shifting constellations in a five-screen installation setting. Daily changing film programmes on a large sixth screen, co-curated by George Lewis (“The Myth of Absence”), Anke Charton (“Das Bild des_der Komponisten_in” & “Komponistinnen Intersektional”), Diedrich Diederichsen and Nicolas Siepen (“Music for Well Over Two Continents”), go beyond the constraints of TV productions from five decades. They aim at reviewing, commenting, and adding to the archives and historical narratives on display. Two concerts and two movie nights with presentations and panels open up current perspectives on this still to be written media history of new music on TV.

Full Program (pdf)

Tele-Visions.
A Critical Media History of New Music on TV, 1950s–1990s

Concept, Curation & Staging Berno Odo Polzer
Curation in collaboration with Anke Charton (Film Programme Screen 4, 26. & 27.3.) Diedrich Diederichsen & Nicolas Siepen (Film Programme Screen 4, 28. & 29.3.) George Lewis (Film Programme Screen 4, 24. & 25.3.) Ilse Müller (Film Programme Screen 4, 30. & 31.3.)

Research Ilse Müller, Berno Odo Polzer, Linda Sepp, Nicolas Siepen
Research 2009 Berno Odo Polzer & Andreas Lewin

Production Management Linda Sepp
Production Assistant Friedrich Weißbach

Visual Concept & Design Nafi Mirzaii
based on a visual concept by fuhrer, Wien

TELE-VISIONS is based in part on research for a film program that was realised in 2009 in the framework of the festival Wien Modern under the artistic direction of Berno Odo Polzer and curated in collaboration with Andreas Lewin.

Special Thanks to Susanne Willems, Mimi Johnson/Lovely Music Ltd., George Lewis, Henning Lohner/Lohnerranger, Uli Aumüller/inpetto Filmproduktion, DRA/Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv – Stiftung von ARD und Deutsch- landradio, INA Institut national de l'audiovisuel, Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien ZKM Karlsruhe, Archiv Frau und Musik, Electronic Arts Intermix EAI, IRCAM/Centre Pompidou, Kurt-Schwaen-Archiv, Archives Sonuma–RTBF, careergirls, Corinne Diserens, Mazen Kerbaj, Claudia Basrawi, Claudia Holanda, Thelma Bonavita, Piero Bonavita, Rosanna Lahoud, Rodolfo Caesar, Mira Adoumier, Rabih Beaini, Lars Petter Hagen, Tilo Lips, Barbara Barthelmes, Nafi Mirzaii, Anna Busdiecker.