After Cinema

This informative, inspiring, and richly illustrated survey book by German journalist, filmmaker and curator Heinz Peter Schwerfel offers an accessible and informative overview on contemporary moving-image art, focusing of contemporary storytelling in media art as the laboratory for new forms in understanding our reality. It elaborates the possibility of media art to short-circuit the mass media’s universally understandable language and make art once again a critical mirror of its time.

Published in English by Berlin-based Hatje Cantz in collaboration with Dirimart, the book is enriched by the media-work stills from around sixty artists from more than twenty countries, including but not limited to Doug Aitken, Halil Altındere, Yael Bartana, Hans Op de Beeck, İnci Eviner, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Erkan Özgen, Julian Rosefeldt, Hito Steyerl, and Martine Syms. Representing new tendencies of dealing with fiction and narration in the art of the moving image, these are elaborated in eight playful and innovative chapters, like ‘Politics of Moralizing’, ‘Mediated Eccentricity’, and ‘Hollywood as Raw Material’, that address various themes of our time, ranging from racism, climate change, and capitalism to fashionable and frightening technologies.

Heinz Peter Schwerfel (b. 1954, Cologne) lives in Paris. He works as a journalist, filmmaker and curator and is the author of books on artists (Georg Baselitz, Jannis Kounellis) and non-fiction books such as Kunst-Skandale (Dumont Literatur U. Kunst, 2000) and Kino und Kunst (Dumont, 2003; Sinema ve Sanat, Dirimart, 2013). As a filmmaker, he produced films about Christian Boltanski, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Christoph Marthaler, Annette Messager, Bruce Nauman, Cees Nooteboom, and many others, as well as TV series for the art channel ARTE (Design, Live Art). In addition, he curated exhibitions of work by Shirin Neshat, Julian Rosefeldt, and Loukia Alavanou (Greek Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2022).