MICHAEL BLUM ::::
born in 1966, Jerusalem, Israel
lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Michael Blum re-reads the production of culture and history in a critical and humorous way in his videos, publications, and installations. In My Sneakers, Blum searches for the origin of a pair of nike sneakers he purchased in Paris, thereby connecting the two very different worlds of producers and consumers, discovering the inequalities of the process. serving as traces of his trip, the evidence bags and video document the different stages of his trip, which eventually lead him to Indonesia. On this trip he discovers all the obstacles between the sneakers’ producers and consumers, providing a critical look at the serious issues resulting from the global organization of labor and economy.

The Three Failures is a sequel to Blum’s Wandering Marxwards, an investigation of Eisenstein’s failure to film marx’s Capital, that addresses the relevance and context of a contemporary re-reading of marx. The Three Failures considers the brutal aspects of capitalism and the consequences of outsourcing and layoffs, as well as the three definitive ideologies of the twentieth century: communism, social democracy, and capitalism. A kind of fairy tale open-air lecture, The Three Failures develops along a basic framework constituted by a sequence of three cities, each of them representing the failure of a political system at a given moment in history: Riga (the past failure of communism), malmö (the current failure of social-democracy), and New York (the upcoming failure of capitalism.) the three cities become one as the world is shrunk to the size of a single house-block.

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