A return to the village where she grew up after an absence of over ten years marks the point of departure for Kirchenbauer’s video work. Photographs taken on this journey are combined with scans of childhood drawings, CD booklets, family photos, and basketball trading cards, as well as reframed scenes of an anime series outlining the life of Marie Antoinette through the story of a fictitious and gender-ambiguous guardsperson. The Capacity for Adequate Anger constitutes an attempt at a personal and self-reflexive form of artistic critique that considers contemporary art, in its production as well as its presentation, from a perspective of class. Alongside questions around the intersections of negative affect and political agency, the work problematises notions around upward mobility that the field of contemporary art both produces and presupposes. Deploying an essayistic approach, the video work reflects upon the manifold meanings of distance in both its subjective and social senses.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s latest work draws exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive of their life up until their lasting estrangement from both parents at age 30. Alternating between the playful, poetic, and unsettling, While The Gods Were Busy With Another Child collages together photographs, 16mm film, VHS footage, interviews, and diary entries — a process of profound and necessary self and social interrogation. Whilst the film unflinchingly presents and analyses a precarious and challenging working-class childhood and adolescence in 1970s Munich, it is nevertheless a testament to the filmmaker’s enduring and wayward spirit of resistance, seeding the possibility of living a life on one’s own terms.

After reading Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, in which the author returns to the working-class village of his childhood, Kumail Syed realised that his life was shaped through a very different experience of class than those around him. Up until that point the filmmaker had denied his background. When he realised that his rejection was an insult to the reality that his parents had experienced, he decided to revisit the neighbourhood of his childhood. Les enfants ont des oreilles bears witness to Syed’s class of origin through the form of a filmed diary. It shows what the working class can represent today through tableaux vivants from the neighbourhood, as well as through the testimonies of the director and his mother, and the people he encountered during his return.