Mike Hoolboom
CAPITALISM(S)
JANUARY 30 TO MARCH 28, 2025
Total running time of exhibition: 40 minutes
OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 5 PM
ARTIST TALK/BOOK LAUNCH: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2 PM
CLOSING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 5 PM
In 2016: a peace deal in Colombia, the Zika virus, failed revolutions in Turkey, Syria, my backyard. A reality TV clown elected US president. I began an open-ended series about capitalism. It was driven by a simple question: what happened to this city? A dozen features and 55 shorts followed. More on the way. Overnight (though it was a long night) the city woke up to new gods: managers and administrators. The term “selling out” became a quaint anarchronism. What will they say about us when we are dead? They sure filled out a lot of forms.
I have two main practices: reading and listening. A decade ago I stepped into new sound pleasures with a couple of thumbnail-sized Clippy Microphones that make recordings of oatmeal just after pouring hot water into it, or soda fizzing in a glass or Russian washing machines. It’s an ongoing practice unattached to utility or results. Whenever I start a new movie there is a large archive of sounds already waiting, supplemented by an archive of pictures and words.
All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us. José Gasset
My words talk me into existence. I am spoken by my culture. Read by books. A mouthpiece, a representative.
Daily I sit
with the language
they’ve made
of our language Solmaz Sharif
What is the role of culture during genocide? Doesn’t every picture from Gaza, most of them made by the people who are “living” there, ask that the slaughter end? If their pictures can’t stop organized death, then what are pictures for?
In Arabic, the word for literature and ethics is one and the same: adab. Adab suggests that it is from literature that we might generate an ethics to guide us in life. Adania Shibli
The images I make or steal are part of “the commons.” For those who believe that copyright is primarily an instrument of corporations to maximize profit, a Creative Commons license encourages the free distribution and re-use of materials. What is language but the re-use of materials? My work, like many others, lives on the internet with a download button that allows viewers to take it and do with it whatever they choose. Buddhists and biologists might name this practice “interdependence,” a recognition that we are all parts of each other, because as the old Communist slogan goes, “property is theft.”
Are all forms of corporate culture based on dissociation? Please relieve me of the burden of having a body. Of all these feelings I can’t name or control. Take me to the ballgame, the tilt-a-whirl, the distraction festival.
The movies in this exhibition are propositions, essays (from the French essai, meaning: trying it out, attemptings, making a test). Failing better is a virtue. Taking it personally is the first road sign. So many friends helped along the way, offering their hearts and wisdoms. Steadily undoing what I had imagined was me and mine. How can I begin to thank them?
FEATURED ONLINE FILMS
After the American Election
2:55 minutes, 2018
Based on dreams (waking and non-waking) by pals and acquaintances of noted American writer Lucy Corin, the night after the epochal US election of 2016. A bevy of speakers weigh in on the new world. Appearances by: Will Smart, Isobella Antellis, Jillian Cabrera, Fred Reimer, Collin Hotchliss, LaShelle Ramirez, Madelyn Kelly, Zoey Peck, Sarah Komjathy, Jess Sobanko, Connor Burns, Jane Kharkover
With thanks to: Emily Vey Duke
Uber
23 minutes 2022
The ride-sharing app Uber swept through my city like a tidal wave, overturning decades of immigrant taxi drivers working impossible hours to provide for their families. I met scientists, researchers, engineers, even a doctor who was waiting for his papers. Overnight the streets were jammed with gig economy recruits, moms and dads hunkered behind the wheel, forced by skyrocketing rents to take on a second or even third part-time job. They were part of the new “sharing
economy,” a phrase that might have emerged from the Ministry of Truth. Renting your home or workplace, your clothes, even lending money or offering a home delivery service have become keystones of the “fourth industrial revolution.”
The institution cannot love you. Tressie McMillan Cottom
In this short doc, two essays by celebrated Egyptian revolutionary intellectual Alaa Abd El-Fattah pulls the curtain back on the magic act of techno-capitalism, explaining how the inevitable has been plotted and executed. These essays can be found in his profound and heartbreaking essay collection You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2022).
White Harlem
9:15 minutes, 2025
The March of Time produced 200 newsreels from 1935-1951, shown in movie theatres once per month. In an 18-minute film from August 1939 film called Metropolis, cameramen travelled across New York City, gathering scenes of its 7.5 million people. This short stitches together scenes shot in Harlem, along with outtakes from that shoot, preserved at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. The footage has been “restored” using AI, image resolution is HD, frame rate 60 fps, colour and grain added.
The voice-over offers reflections on the way these images were framed through an apartheid lens, a reflection of the white men who ran and staffed the newsreel company. W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Christina Sharpe offer second thoughts. How many movies are made without any pictures in them?
“Our culture tends to train us to understand police officers as enforcers of the law, so we often think of them as reacting to problematic or illegal behavior. But a theme that runs throughout the historiography of policing in the United States is the way that officers are trained to find and even construct criminality for themselves.” Emily Brooks
FEATURE FILMS (in gallery)
Skinned
8:34 minutes, 2021
A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections: pensive, disbelieving, grieving, philosophical. We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. Now we had each other.
“Skinned offers an excellent combination of shot footage and digital intervention, maintaining a rigorous formal cleanliness without a visual overload. The significative, and never banal, use of slow-motion supports a narrative that puts itself forward in time, hypothesizing future anthropological changes that see humanity isolated from everything else, even from itself: a sci-fi future that doesn’t seem too distant from our own, and one that invites necessary reflection.” Jury statement, Best of Experimental and Art Film Category, Malatesta Short Film Festival.
We were dying and bored, the old world had passed while the new one winked through the haze. In this moment of mass addiction, the algorithm revolution nearly complete, the oligarchs astride it all, what would happen if neoliberal’s fave new toy, the internet – the surveillance society turned into a domestic cash machine and distraction organ – went on strike, had a holiday, crashed for good? I watched my friends get pulled into the capitalist maw, chasing better neighbourhoods for their kids and the steady flow of shit that kept us from feeling anything at all. Then we turned on, plugged in, dropped out. A restless dread filled our news feeds, an immanent sense that we were ending, or that the world we had known was ending, kept us watching. Voyeurs of our own car crash. But what if the internet stopped one morning as suddenly as it began? What if we were returned for a moment to our own neighbourhoods, our own skin, our own faces? Could we rejig the art of conversation, the close-up, find a level place to admit the best and worst of all?
Rain
5:23 minutes, 2023
One hundred children were dying every day in Gaza when I made this hopeless poem of hope. How to step into a new kind of Jerusalem without becoming what we feared? How to leave behind every notion of the chosen few, and embrace the ones along the way, finding a promised land in each other?
Based on an excerpt from the poem Red Sea: April 2002 by Aurora Levins Morales, a disabled Puerto Rican Jewish writer and activist.
“The film is extremely beautiful in its melding of image and sound and text. I loved the text so much; its cadences made me wonder if it was yours—until the credits. The whole seemed so resonant of this moment: the climate crisis, Israel-Palestine, the need to come together at such moments, the text emerging out of image out of the sound of rain the tromp of boots of footsteps the moments of intimacy the woman in the hijab holding out her open palm. It would be amazing to encounter this on a large screen. I felt truly moved by it.” Catherine Bush
“A little poem to add to the world, provide a crystal of hope, at a time when dialogue has degraded to us and them and perpetual horrors.” Gary Popovich
Ice Cream
8:14 minutes, 2021
An ice cream factory worker reflects on AIDS and the new capitalism. “A move from a regime of cultural production ordered by authorship, originality and signature to one ordered by the brand, branding and simulation.” This short essay doc is indebted to deep digs by Emily Martin, Lisa Adkins and Karen Ho.
Disco
14:50 minutes, 2023
Based on kpunk’s seminal UK blog, Disco looks at how the 60s actually occupied England in the 70s. Liberation movements flourished, along with a new queer dance form that offered new social spaces for an intersectional underclass. The reaction shot to these new incursions into democracy was a corporate coup d’etat that would come to be known as neoliberalism. Its first laboratory was in Chile, where American economists provided intellectual cover for national looting.
“to move in this way was but one of a few freedoms afforded to those who came before.” Caleb Azumah Nelson
Body Electric
A rework of the iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new ambient intelligence promises security, rapid response, predictive analysis, microgeneration, efficiency. Here it delivers funwashing messages from the cloud for users in a performative essay on domotics. Talk back from the data harvest and Orwell’s “never sleeping ear.” To challenge them is to “fight the future.”
“the ‘evolution’ of the household is seen as an expression of some autonomous technological ‘progress.’ The dream is a domestic machine-utopia … in which human agents are passive and infantilized. In such technocratic scripts the household is severed from its surrounding (economic, social and political) contexts.” (Robins & Hepworth, 1988)
“We will receive emails not only from friends but also from household appliances, domestic animals and the food in our fridge… The transparency society has become indistinguishable from a society of total surveillance. Everything around us observes and surveys us, tracking what we do and do not do. The fridge, for instance, will know our eating habits, the networked toothbrush the details of our dental hygiene regime. These things will actively record all aspects of our lives.” Byung-Chul Han
Incoming
2:45 minutes, 2025
A collection of 64 photographs, in black-and-white and colour, offer a suite of candid portraits showing faces old and young, all looking up into an unknown moment of the present. Not a single-channel film, but an installation loop.
“a kind of ceremony / for transporting the dead/ through the living world” Nick Lantz
BIOGRAPHY
Mike Hoolboom began making movies in 1980. Making as practice, a daily application. Ongoing remixology. 100+ movies, 100 fest awards. Feature-length bio docs, then an ongoing series about capitalism. The animating question of community: how can I help you? Interviews with media artists for 3 decades. 30+ books, written, edited, co-edited. Local ecologies. Volunteerism. Opening the door.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
The Situationist International (1957-1972) was an international group of artists who used the history of art to weigh in on contemporary capitalism. Writings, actions and found footage films were produced. SI embraced the dynamic tension between obsolete and machine-made commodities, offering a Marx-influenced critique. As artists, they understood that images had become more important than people, and that social relations were increasingly mediated and even made possible by images. As authors, they gave their audiences glimpses of a mechanized society functioning within a transactional culture. The cover story for ruling class tyrannies was the spectacle, an immersive display of signs and entertainments designed to create an alternating current of distraction and obedience.
The Situationist’s work on capitalism is one of the key antecedents for the practice of Mike Hoolboom. Their seminal works provide vital lenses to understand his artistic vision presented in a multi-part video installation entitled Capitalism(s) which is on view at the John B. Aird Gallery from January 30 to March 28, 2025.
Hoolboom’s exhibition, organized by Aird director/curator Carla Garnet, includes five short films playing in continuous loops in the gallery: Skinned (8:34 minutes 2021), Ice Cream (8:14 minutes 2021), Rain (5:23 minutes 2023), Disco (14:50 minutes 2023) and Body Electric (2:50 minutes, 2024). In addition, Incoming (2:45 minutes 2025) screens simultaneously on the Aird’s two street-facing monitors. The movies’ soundtracks are accessible via headphones and there is seating in the Gallery. Three works are available online, including After the American Election (3:15 minutes 2018), Uber (23 minutes, 2023) and The Central Gesture (made with Heather Frise) (1:45 minutes, 2023).
Each digital movie presents a striking collection of visual and auditory fragments drawn from the relentless stream that flickers across our screens. The artist’s recycled collages show the work of capital in motion. This is the filmmaker’s magic trick: redrafting archives to produce deeply affective and immersiveexperiences. Rhythms of resistance.
Portraits of temporary communities are ghosts that haunt this practice. Like Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964-66), Hoolboom returns to the face of his subjects again and again, whether the youthful dreamers of After the American Election, the digital prostheses of Skinned, or the museum of old loves in Ice Cream.
Pulling back the curtain, in a manner analogous to Hal Foster’s analysis in The Return of the Real (1994), Hoolboom’s work is part of an avant-garde that “returns from the future,” in a “continual process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.” He loosens the ideological origins of each image in order to create new assemblages, alternative lines of flight, new possibilities for community and resistance. His work posits that while ruling class ideologies may either be in the process of decline or collapse, they continue to exert influence over livelihoods and planetary health.
Karl Marx: Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour… (Capital Volume 1)
Marx drew from folk tales to narrate capital’s vampiric qualities. Hoolboom follows suit, recasting moments from popular and unpopular cultures in order to create visual essays that offer stories of resistance and refusal, highlighting unnoticed linkages, even solidarities.
In a moment when the American empire is committed to ongoing wars, alongside unchallenged global surveillance and the terminal threat of climate change, art has become a place where machines can talk back, where new bodies can be tried on and tested. New reflections on health, care work, and who is considered human are more necessary than ever. Hoolboom’s Capitalism(s) is a timely reflection on events new and old.
by Carla Garnet