New film program about America

The American people will cast their vote on 5 November 2024. To mark the occasion, Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents a series of short films by artists that home in on the America that is heading to the ballot — a nation known for its extravagant entertainment industry, its deep cultural folklore, economic inequality, and a political culture full of sensational events.

Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese’s impressive work Political Advertisement X, 1952-2024 is an extensive and still-developing archive of presidential campaign television commercials since the 1950s, effectively illustrating the history of American democracy since the start of TV advertising. Here we see the people, the myths, the class struggle, family life, freedom and folklore in small, consumer-like stories designed to help Americans identify themselves and put their X on the right place on the ballot.

Jeron Braxton’s animation Oxytocin is an exploration of poverty and exploitation, surveillance and addiction in the contemporary US, while Sondra Perry’s Phantom Menace focuses on the intimate space that has developed over time in American barbershops. In Speaking in Tongues by Christopher Harris is a film about Black ecstasy and the carceral forces arrayed against it. Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo highlights the American consumerism bathed in a baby blue color; What do colors mean in commercial communication, and how do colors and other design factors affect the values that are constantly renegotiated by the shifting conditions of consumption, technology, and desire? New Red Order’s Capture Culture: Terminal Adddition! questions how and from what perspective the nation’s mythical origin stories are written.

Together, the film works provide an insight into some of the themes that pervade the United States, which will inaugurate a new president in January.

Program

New Red Order, Capture Culture: Terminal Addition!, 2020. 7 min.
Jeron Braxton, Oxytocin, 2023. 7 min.
Christopher Harris, Speaking in Tongues: Take One, 2024. 15 min
Sara Cwynar, Baby Blue Benzo, 2024. 21:33 min.
Sondra Perry, Phantom Menace, 2023. 3 min.
Antoni Muntadas & Marshall Reese, Political Advertisement X: 1952-2024, 1984-ongoing. 138 min.

Practical information

The film program can be experienced 29 October 2024 – 12 January 2025.

It is free to see the films in our cinema with paid admission to Kunsthal Charlottenborg.