Oliver Ressler Discusses Political Art and New Worker-Controlled Factory Film Cycle

An interview between Austrian artist Oliver Ressler and critic Mike Watson, adapted from a live dialogue at Medienwerkstatt in Vienna on October 10, 2015, explores Ressler's ideological filmmaking approach. Ressler, based in Vienna, creates installations and films on economics, democracy, and resistance, rejecting neutrality as a bourgeois myth. He details his 2006 film The Fittest Survive, which required over six months to secure permissions from a private security company training corporate employees for war zones. His 2014 work The Visible and the Invisible, developed during a residency at Utopiana in Geneva, uses fog as an aesthetic device to reveal hidden commodity markets. Ressler is currently collaborating with sociologist Dario Azzellini on a film cycle about worker-controlled factories in Europe, with three completed films on factories in Milan, Rome, and Thessaloniki. The interview critiques the effectiveness of political art, noting risks of commodification and the proliferation of biennials, while Ressler emphasizes art's role in making invisible systems visible and supporting social movements. His exhibition Last Gasp Of Things As They Are runs at GPL Contemporary in Vienna through July 16, 2016. The online exclusive was published on June 28, 2016.