Non-Consensual Act (in progress) First Treatment (2013)
By Goshka Macuga
In 2012, Goshka Macuga became familiar with the Afghan Film Archive in Kabul. After she learned about their precarious and fragile situation in a war-torn country, she became interested in the visual material of the archive. She asked to purchase off-cuts, strips of film that were thrown away during the process of digitization, to see what its film residues would bring to the surface. Soon she received nineteen separate reels on 35mm film which contained censored, violent and sexually explicit scenes from Afghan and foreign films. She began to understand that she had acquired reels whose content did not meet her expectations. Taking this surprise as a starting point, Macuga developed an interest in the context behind these images which operate in a “totally different affective register” than expected and oftentimes depict men sexually assaulting women. For her project Non-Consensual Act (in progress) (2013), Macuga decided to reedit the material into a narrative that concentrates on the images’ abstract visual language. Simultaneously, the artist gives an oral insight into her research on cultural and societal restrictions in Afghanistan and their influence on the stagnating fil…
Watch Non-Consensual Act (in progress) First Treatment on Fast Ubu