Gramercy, New York
Total Refusal
Total Refusal
Goethe-InstitutThe Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to present the first New York City institutional solo exhibition of the filmmaking collective Total Refusal. Founded in 2018, the pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla group of artists, researchers, and filmmakers upcycle the resources of mainstream video games to create political narratives in the form of videos, interventions, performances, and lectures. The artists of Total Refusal are keen onlookers of our world and the derivative products of our society. Video games, as cultural objects, are rich artifacts that hold up a mirror to reflect the values and social realities of the cultures that produce them. In the videos presented in this exhibition, Total Refusal probes the presentation and re-presentation of our world as mediated through the experience of digital mapping (Superwonder, 2021); walks the viewer through a Tom Clansy-based post-apocalyptic New York City on a casual historical tour punctuated by bullets and night-stalkers to reveal the invisible history of this built environment (Operation Jane Walk, 2018); and investigates the hard-coded labor of NPCs (non-player characters), the gendered roles of traditional societies, and Sisyphean repetition without relief or respite, recalling the ethos of late-stage-capitalism (Hardly Working, 2022). Total Refusal uses the contemporary mainstream video game as a didactic tool to unveil and subvert the contingencies of human perception, culture, environment, and sociality, thereby revealing the potentialities of alternative ways of being. Curated by Zachary B. Feldman Curatorial Assistance by Olivia Al-Slaiman Photo credit: Marc Tatti