Filmscreening mit Künstlergespräch "Architectural Utopias and Racial Hierarchies"

In the organizer's words:

After a screening of

Dani Gal: White City

artist and filmmaker Dani Gal (born 1975 in Jerusalem) will talk about his work and be available to answer questions.

White City

HD video, 25 min., 2018

On 16 August 1933, Arthur Ruppin wrote the following entry in his diary: "Through Dr. Georg Landauer, I travelled to Jena on 3 August to meet Prof. Hans F.K. Günther, the founder of National Socialist racial theory. The conversation lasted two hours. Günther was very sympathetic, but did not want to be described as the originator of the Aryan concept, and agreed with me that the Jews were not inferior, but different, and that the Jewish question had to be resolved fairly."

The film revolves around the complex personality of Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), one of the founders of the Zionist settlement movement, who campaigned for coexistence with the Palestinians before the state of Israel was founded. Ruppin was also an enthusiastic researcher in the field of racial science, which explains his motivation to seek out Hans F.K. Günther (1891-1968) - the German racial researcher and eugenicist who later became a significant influence on National Socialist racial ideology.

The film shows Ruppin during his visit to the Weißenhofsiedlung, a Stuttgart neighborhood known for its modern architecture, and lets him experience flashbacks that reflect his views. The film's monologues and dialogs are mainly based on Ruppin's diaries.

Dani Gal's work explores the emergence of memory and collective history. His films and sound installations reconstruct and reconfigure existing documentary material, combine it with fiction and refer to current political events.

They have been shown many times, including at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), the New Museum, New York (2012), the Jewish Museum, New York (2014), the Berlinale Forum Expanded (2014), the Kunsthaus Zürich (2015), the Kunsthalle Wien (2015), documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018 and 2023).

Gal lives in Berlin.