Bad People, Bad News

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The historical background for Bad People, Bad News is the story of the Victory Arch monument erected by Saddam Hussein in 1989. This consists of two triumphal arches, each formed by two 43-metre-long swords held by arms protruding from the ground. The arms and hands for the monument were made in Europe and are said to have been modelled on Hussein himself, who reportedly had many doubles. A copy of his fingerprint was stored in the safe of the London foundry responsible and caused a stir when Hussein was arrested and questions were raised about his identity. Starting with the history of the monument’s creation, the installation addresses the question of how the ideologies of dictatorships become part of the writing of history. It is situated in the context of addressing the propaganda machinery of the Islamic State terrorist militia and its brutal strategies of destroying archives and monuments, and the theft and sale of art and cultural assets, as well as media self-dramatisation at cultural sites such as Palmyra. In this essayistic film, the different contexts, stories and experiences are recounted and interwoven by three Kurdish women. They meet every year in a different presidential suite of a hotel to celebrate the death of the ex-president and dictator Saddam Hussein. The focus is on a box they always carry with them. It is an archive of drawings, texts and events that they created after Hussein’s death. From this collection they draw details and cues that set their stories in motion again and again. In this way, an overall narrative is formed about states, dictatorships, monuments, terror and questions about power and interpretive sovereignty, originality and forgery. The film resists the staging of media images by avoiding them altogether and negotiates the possibilities of memory itself as it tells a story about disappearance. The essayistic film installation was originally produced for the exhibition "Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives" at Akademie der Künste, Berlin and is still on view until 19 September. With and by: Hatice Aktaș, Gülistan Durç, Gülizar Karagöz Baran Hêvî, Paul Niedermayer, Sozdar Koçer, Konstantin von Sichart, Arez Asso Anwar, Antonia Lange, Niklas Binzberger, Nicolas Keil, Tobias Gringel, Max Heesen, Venus Nemitz, Anna Philippa Müller, Dastan Jasim, Leyla Yenirce, Eren Kılıç, Kadir Doğan, Şahin Özel, Daniel Erlemann, Diljar Boseli, Caio Soares, Jens Crull

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