DO WORRY BE HAPPY
KUNTSHALLE BARMEN
MAY 25 - AUGUST 31, 2025
Tim Sandows film COUNTRY CREW premieres as part of the group show entitled DO WORRY BE HAPPY at Kunsthalle Barmen, Wuppertal, DE, which opens on Friday May 23.
In the exhibition, works by established artists are shown together with works by up-and-coming artists and art students from the University of Wuppertal. The unifying element between all the exhibits is the theme of the exhibition: worries, fears and coping strategies for all the unpleasant feelings that arise from current world events are reflected in the artists' installations, paintings, photographs and video works on display.
ARTISTS:
Svenja Biedenbach, Pink Büchsenschütz, Tudor Ciurescu, Francisco de Goya, Luna De Luca, Frankfurter Hauptschule, Selma Gültoprak, Jonas Habrich, Ivo Kiefer, Jody Korbach, Christiane Möbus, Ben Joy Muin, Daniel Richter, Tim Sandow, Toni Schmale, Nasan Tur, Samira Turan und Rachel.
https://kunsthallebarmen.de/wp/veranstaltung/do-worry-be-happy/
COUNTRY CREW FILM:
Tim Sandow's film Country Crew is supposedly about the strange events surrounding a plane crash. The actions of the characters in this story are difficult to categorize. Nobody speaks, their behavior is not explained by comprehensible constraints or social conventions. At times, what goes on there seems familiar, but this familiarity is nipped in the bud by the fact that something is always wrong. What can you rely on here? The uniform or the absurd mask? On the fact that pets are secured in small cages during transportation or on the fact that they are not actually pets? That snacks are served with still water at meetings as a matter of course, or that absent participants are fed like birds? That a person wearing a uniform could be a male pilot? Where can viewers pick up narrative threads, where can they fall back on viewing habits and classic role models, only to lose them again and not be able to weave them into a narrative tapestry? There are breaks in the short episodes that are woven together. But recurring motifs with an ambiguous symbolic charge can be found again and again, laying trails and seemingly leading puzzle pieces to one another. Flamingos, uniforms, warnings of the end of the world, canned food... as in conspiracy fantasies, we can be inclined to take the symbolic chunks as shiny clues to read something stringent - or at least somehow meaningful - from them. As in the impenetrable, barely reconcilable and color-coded information on all the man-made tragedies of our world, we cling to what seems plausible, interpretable, recurring and nameable. Referring to Susan Sontag's essay “Against Interpretation”, this film encourages us to fragment the intangible whole in order to get hold of it, only to realize that the reassembly of the flimsy fragments can be just as uncertain as the non-intellectual confrontation with the visually stunning scenes before.
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
COUNTRY CREW (2025)
HD single channel installation
color, sound, 13:05 min
Cast: Guido Renner, Taylor Drury, Luciény Kaabral, Timna Beckmann
Director & Screenwriter: Tim Sandow
Score Composer: Lukas Lauermann
Production Company: Wupperwerft GmbH
