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?
