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| Boulos Mark Born in 1975 in Boston. Lives and works in the Netherlands. My work asks why video so powerfully coerces a suspension of disbelief. The genre of my work may be “documentary”, but I don’t report objective facts, and instead aim to undermine empiricism by representing subjective belief so devout that it becomes real. That is why I make films about religious ecstasy and political militancy. My films examine events in which ideas become material, performance becomes authentic, word becomes deed, transcendence becomes immanent, or mythology becomes history. With a combination of iconography and documentary, I aim for my work to synthesize the two antithetical modes of art that are the primitive and the contemporary: the authentic, religious object of art, whose value is in ritual and the digitally reproducible, immaterial projection, whose value is in mass exhibition. All that is Solid Melts into Air is a two-screen film about globalization and dematerialization. It is inspired by Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism”, in which commodities seem to take on metaphysical properties because they are imbued with hidden labor relations. I focus on the most geo-politically and economically important of all commodities, petroleum. It opposes the two endpoints that mark oil’s disappearance: its colonial extraction, and the financial markets. One screen portrays the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, freedom fighters that battle the corporate and state forces that steal their oil, pollute their environment, and keep them poor. The other screen portrays the futures and derivatives trading pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange during the first days of the current credit crisis, when the first American investment bank collapsed.  Download CV |  All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 2008 |
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