From a jihadist assassination to the outskirts of
Beijing, this suite of short films by artist Lewis Klahr are opaque and intriguing
Lewis Klahr is an
American artist, collagist and animator who here presents a watchably weird curation of six short pieces made between 2013 and 2019. He’s cutting and pasting images from magazines and comic-books that float, bounce and pinball around the screen. The faces of Xi, Trump and
Kim Jong-un will shuffle in and out of the frame like something by Terry Gilliam, and all to an accompaniment of experimental
music by Daniel Rosenboom, Tom Recchion and Scott Walker; the latter’s 2012 album Bish Bosch is used, with its strident lyrics such as: “I’ve severed my reeking gonads and fed them to your shrunken face!”
Klahr’s images are often about capitalism and alienation and it’s notable how they appear to prophesy the Covid lockdown, especially the first film, Capitalist Roaders, with its images of stymied travel, scrunched and folded banknotes and people in medical masks. Perhaps the point of capitalism was that it was supposed to be internationally unfettered. In more than one film, Klahr uses the disturbing picture of the jihadi
Gunman who shot dead the
Russian ambassador to
Turkey at an Ankara art exhibition in 2016. Perhaps he couldn’t resist this image of the ultimate situationist art nightmare.