Helenés (Apparition of Freedom)

Helenés (Apparition of Freedom) brings together two forms of political propaganda separated by time and ideology. In 1998, Christoph Draeger discovered and secretly removed a 16mm film from an abandoned civil-protection training camp in Hungary. The footage documents a Cold War military exercise preparing civilians for the imagined devastation of nuclear war: gas masks, ruined landscapes, emergency procedures, and images of catastrophe.

In 2005, Draeger returned to this apocalyptic material and paired it with excerpts from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, a speech organized around the promise of spreading freedom and democracy. The collision produces an uneasy symmetry between the ideological languages of East and West: images designed to prepare a population for annihilation become accompanied by the rhetoric of liberation. Rather than simply opposing propaganda with reality, Helenés reveals how fear, freedom, catastrophe, and political authority can be constructed through images and language.

Christoph Draeger is a Swiss artist and filmmaker whose work frequently engages with catastrophe, violence, disaster, and their representation through mass media and found images.

Hungary / USA 2005 | 17'50"

Continuous screening - see www.gogbot.nl/timetable for the schedule