3 March 22, 9 pm

in English

Venue: KW, 4th floor

Registration via pogobar@kw-berlin.de

In accordance with the current Covid-19 regulations the advanced 2G+ rule (vaccinated or recovered as well as bolstered or negatively tested) applies for all KW events. Furthermore we ask all participants to wear a FFP-2 mask throughout the event.

Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta (2021) revolves around the young stylist Leo (played by Ulman), who, following the death of her father, is forced to return home from London to live again with her kleptomaniac mother Maria (played by Ulman’s mother Ale). The duo tries to avoid eviction from their apartment in the former industrial town Gijón in northern Spain. Despite significant debts, mother and daughter stoically maintain a bourgeois façade; they won’t give up eating luxury food, continue to have beauty treatments, and find ways to walk around in the dresses and shoes of their desire.

Over the course of one week the film unravels the daughter’s hopes, which are put to a test as she attempts to use her sexuality as a means of escape. Meanwhile the mother grifts her way into the definite security of a prison sentence. El Planeta is a dark comedy exploring contemporary class struggle, female desire, and complicated relationships between mothers and daughters.

The screening at the Pogo Bar will be followed by a Q&A via Zoom between the artist and Léon Kruijswijk, Assistant Curator at KW.

Ulman’s feature-length film debut premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021. With the work, the artist continues her playful blurring of fact and fiction and uses representation, configuration and performance as a tactical tool to question authority in various forms of storytelling, across a variety media. In 2014, Ulman came into prominence with her socio-critical Instagram project Excellences & Perfections. She has presented her work among others at Swiss Institute, NYC; Tate Modern, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the 9^th Berlin Biennale, Berlin.