I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021
Screening and meeting with Pierre Bal-Blanc

  • I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021

We invite you to the Museum on the Vistula to the screening of „I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021” and meeting with the director Pierre Bal- Blanc.  

On the morning of 19 October 1961, the international press gave a wide-ranging account of the tragic events that took place in Parise after the introduction of a curfew against North Africans. Two days prior, on October 17, Parisian and national police violently repressed the anticolonial Algerian demonstrations, leading to a massacre that was censored by the authorities until this date. This film, based on the work of the conceptual artist On Kawara, invites the viewer to relive the story.

In “I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021.” Thomas Ducasse improvises the script built around sources that bear witness to these events (newspapers, archives, historical accounts) by playing the role of a policeman tasked with maintaining order. His confession, delivered over the phone to an interlocutor, draws a kind of geography of events by reconstructing the map of places where the drama took place, and by sticking to facts as they are reproduced in archives today.

Pierre Bal-Blanc, 2023
France, Greece
56 min
Language English
Production Jeff Wall Production (Pierre Bal-Blanc), Hot Wheels Athens (Hugo Wheeler, Julia Gardener)
Photography Fabio Balducci
Dubbing Priyank Morjaria
Sound Aris Athanasopoulos
Editing Pierre Bal-Blanc

Pierre Bal-Blanc is an independent curator and essayist based in Athens and Paris. Born in a working-class environment in Ugine, Savoie, France, his destiny changed at the age of 17 following his meeting with Johan van der Keuken with whom he co-directed Le Résistant (1983), a collective short film in Annecy coordinated by Thierry Nouel. In 1988, he founded Jeff Wall Production, which used the title of his first published critical text on the artist of the same name as a signature for his future projects. In 1992 he made the video Contrat de travail (Employment Contract) in relation to his experience as a performer for Felix Gonzalez Torres. He has published numerous texts and collaborated on film and exhibition productions with David Lamelas, Pierre Huyghe, Rainer Oldendorf, Marie Voignier, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Markus Schinwald, Beatrice Gibson, Rosalind Nashhashibi, Artur Zmijewski, Terre Thaemlitz, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, whom he helped to make known in France during his artistic direction of the CAC Brétigny and abroad when curating biennials (Lyon, Berlin, documenta Kassel). He recently directed the video Olympia Between in relation to the work of Victor Burgin.
 

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