THEO ESHETU

The Body Electric

Ariane Beyn & Theo Eshetu (Eds.)

The Body Electric is the first complete survey of video artist and filmmaker Theo Eshetu’s thirty-five-year career. Eshetu examines the imagery of the collective unconscious, exploring cultural identity and challenging official media narratives through a complex interplay of signs and symbols. Eshetu’s videos possess a dreamlike quality in which gestures, fragmented actions, and the mirroring and multiplying of images into kaleido- scopic patterns question the very reality of what an image can reveal. The catalog offers an in-depth presentation of Eshetu’s engagement with a variety of genres and medias, including experimental cinema, documentary films, large-scale video installations, and live performances. The visuals are complemented with a critical essay by video-art historian Wulf Herzogenrath on Eshetu’s early films in the context of experimental video-making in the 1980s; an analysis of three of Eshetu’s feature-length films by writer and curator David Elliot; commentary on his work in documenta 14, Atlas Fractured (2017) by Monika Szewczyk; and an interview with Eshetu about the role of music, montage, and the representation of Africa in his films by curator Okwui Enwezor.

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