Border Act
David Rych
In Border Act refugees are prepared for dealings with the authorities in the fictional context of improvised theatre. Among other things, it is about visualizing processes that generally take place behind closed doors and therefore remain hidden from the public eye. Where the staging goes hand in hand with a protagonist’s personal position and story and so explores real circumstances, it opens up new space for critical questioning of the present world, investigating existing conditions in politics, media and the public. The immersive video installation, as a set-up assembled from various pretexts, plays with interlocking levels of reality and incorporates the viewers. Each individual observer is transported to the centre of the action and so can experience the scenario without any restrictions of perspective.
Contributors: Mehdi Hussain Bangash, Elobeid Elmesbah, Katharina Hölbing, Ismail Jama, Claudia Kasebacher, Wolfgang Klingler, Christina Matuella, Askar Niman, Osayi Okundaye, Endurance Osayamwen Uwadia, Simona Schett
Border Act was supported financially in the context of stadt_potenziale Innsbruck in 2014. At the same time, the project is a follow-up within the framework of the International Fellowship-Program for Art and Theory in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, where artist David Rych originally developed his film idea while receiving a fellowship in 2012/13.
David Rych, *1975 in Innsbruck, lives in Berlin; he has been a member of the Tiroler Künstler*schaft since 2008. In his works Rych concentrates on questions of identity and reality construction – in particular, he investigates knowledge production and representation in relation to the relevant political backgrounds. His films are spurred by questions about the constitution and construction of “society”, whereby the themes, in each case, help determine his selection of a documentary format. In this way, another topic examined is the genre of documentary film with its many variations and also the conditions of filmmaking as such. Rych studied at the University of Innsbruck (1993-95), the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1995-2001), and Bezael University in Jerusalem (1999-2000); he also completed a postgraduate programme at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille (2004-05). Among other things, he has participated in the Manifesta 8 (2010) and the Berlin Biennale (2012). Since 2014 David Rych has been a professor at the Art Academy in Trondheim (KiT), part of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.
