My work as a visual artist can be characterised as a transition from the depiction of the individual reality towards the collective meaning of the media image in society. By focusing on its use, mediation and distribution of the media image in times of internet and reflecting on the phenomena's in the democratised media process and the construction of collective truth. It results in a cacophony of realities and truths, with the process of losing its context through the flood of images we are at mercy of.
‘Cinetube’ media literacy youth education program, 2012-2015 - Cinetube, in co-operation with Meike Eggers, aims to initiate and empower media literacy under children of different
cultural backgrounds, in the age between 6 and 22. The workshops will help
children understand the working of media, to provide more conscious decisions in
using the medium as well what impact media can and how to us media for instead
of against them. In cooperation with Meike Eggers and collaboration with r-newt,
skvr and the foundation ‘de verre bergen’.
cinetube animation workshop, age 6-12
cinetube video/documentary workshop, age 10-18
cinetube visual storytelling, interview and storyboard writing workshop, elementary
school ibn-i-sina, islamic school Rotterdam
cinetube edutainment program girls-problems, age 10-22
Girl Problems is a Rotterdam edutainment program that covers topics that girls
struggle with. Four episodes deal with the problems of growing up girls in puberty.
How does the Islamic Soraya deal with the fact that she is in love with a Dutch boy
while her family is preparing for marriage with another boy? Or how is Mandy
doing, experimenting with drugs and getting addicted?
All main characters are distraught, but always support each other. Girl Problems
uses edutainment (education and entertainment) as a way to inform, empower and
contribute to their personal and talent development. Through the series, problems
and dilemmas of young girls are made visible and negotiable.
What is special about the TV program is that it was made by young people from
Rotterdam Feijenoord. The girls crawl into the characters while boys play
supporting roles or take a seat behind the camera. Girl Problems is therefore a
project for the participating youngsters in which, thanks to the intensive
supervision in the form of acting, camera & production lessons, they are given the
space to develop their talents and thus give more direction to their own ambitions
and choices.
‘Verboden vlucht’/‘forbidden flight’ documentary film, 2010-2015 - In the summer of 1983 at a secret location somewhere in the GDR, the young
couple Thomas and Gundula Anhalt try to flee to the West with their children in a
self-built airplane.
Longing for freedom and a better future for their children, Thomas and Gundula
want to escape from life in a communist dictatorship. Thomas and Gundula are
secretly building a small plane in an open space in a forest. Their escape attempt is
betrayed.
After an unsuccessful flight attempt, the parents are imprisoned separately from
their children in the cellars of the Stasi, the East German secret service. The two
children are placed with family separately from each other. After two years the
children and their parents get reunited on the other side of the wall.
In Hester Overmars's ‘verboden vlucht’, the four family members talk about their
memories and the consequences of this major episode in their lives.
How do the children view the choices that their parents made for them at the time?
This documentary shows how a totalitarian system can drive people mad.
‘Blokmapping’ artist book, web-archive, exposition/ mixed media, 2010-2012 - In ‘Blokmapping’ Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt map their Hillesluis district in
Rotterdam in detail. Eggers and Anhalt made an inventory of all trash cans, trees,
lampposts, sidewalk tiles, residents and cars within a radius of 333 meters around
their home on the Blokweg. A search in Google yielded a variety of archive material
from local newspapers, Hyves pages and Chamber of Commerce registrations.
Soon, the dry data were enriched with coloured stories from local residents. The
overwhelming whole of 12,000 items of figures, facts and personal stories about
living in a deprived neighbourhood was bundled on www.blokmapping.net and a
bulky publication. The aim of this project was to describe how a deprived
neighbourhood feels trough a variety of perspectives. Eggers and Anhalt call their
research method extreme mapping: they use the extensive inventory to document
and interpret the radical changes of a plural society in recent years within a limited
number of square meters.
‘Lichtwolke’/‘light-cloud’ multimedia installation, 2008-2010 - …The opposite of this slow journalism is the ‘Lichtwolke’ by Meike Eggers and
Michael Anhalt. They are fascinated by the image bombing in which we live and
have made an installation of nine projections of photos and film images, historical
and contemporary, all from amateurs, all circling around the theme and their
relation of power. The raging projections are also constantly changing due to the
movements of the spectators. Everyone, the makers of the images but also those
who look at them, are now co-authors.
‘Protagonist’ mixed media installation, 2006-2008 - The Protagonist from Michael Anhalt (1976, Germany), refer's to the political situation in the German Democratic Republic and its pan-optical system of power, surveillance and control. The work questions photography and its usage as evidence and remembrance in relation to the author, displaying a persons conflict being the inmate and warder. The work combines former secret images made by the secret service, personal and cinematic found footage, off the record, and a personal family photographic archive from the former GDR.
‘Apathie’, artist book, 2004-2006, self-published in 2008 - On the base of its personal memories, photographer Michael Anhalt goes in search of his past. At the age of seven, his parents tried to flee Eastern Germany with a self-built plane. The attempt failed and his parents were caught by the secret service and put in prison. Michael Anhalt reconstructed the events by focusing on the spots in this period of his youth and contrasting them with the political prison of its parents.
