Silvia Kolbowski presents the video works Who will save us? (2022) and Missing Asher (2019) in two exhibition spaces at Kunsthaus Glarus. The work Who will save us? was created especially for this exhibition. The video is a “mashup” of two films: Metropolis (1927, directed by Fritz Lang) and THX 1138 (1971, directed by George Lucas), both futuristic science fiction films about life and work in hierarchical two-class societies. In Who will save us? Kolbowski reduces three and a half hours of film from two different decades into a 14-minute film loop. The experimental compilation of footage creates a new narrative that resonates with the prescience of the original films, but relates to the present political moment, in which the psychological aspects of group dynamics interact with neoliberal capitalism’s embrace of technology and polarized wealth.

In her work, Kolbowski employs mainly time-based media to grapple with questions of historicity, political resistance, and the influence of the unconscious on socio-politically motivated mass movements. As part of her conceptual approach, she often draws on historical source material in analyzing and working experimentally with cultural phenomena and power-structure imbalances.

The video Missing Asher (2019) is a further elaboration on Enlarged from the Catalogue: Michael Asher Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979 (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1983), a site-specific, installation work from 1990. In this video, Kolbowski addresses the creation and evolution of her own project. In the voiceover, she recaps the difficulty of surviving the art market with non-commercial, ephemeral, artistic work. In addition, she investigates the connection between attributes of individualism in late-1980s-emergent neo-capitalism and the format of the group exhibition and its signs of wear and tear in the gallery system. In Missing Asher, Kolbowski is concerned with the rules dictating the commercial circulation of aesthetic values. The video work – including her correspondence with the influential conceptual artist, Michael Asher – raises the question of whether the de facto stipulations of the art market are permanently aligned against conceptual, research-based works.

Accompanying the exhibition is an interview with Silvia Kolbowski by Melanie Ohnemus.