Kophietheater was the culmination of White’s 2009 experimental screening series It's not the homosexual who is perverse, but the situation in which he lives and was realised as part of the Berlinale’s experimental Forum strand.

As well as returning to the eponymous Rosa von Praunheim film – again screened in parallel with a slide work by Every Ocean Hughes (f.k.a. Emily Roysdon) – White invited a group of people who had attended the previous year’s event to take part in a performative event in the auditorium. White framed the invitation in very open terms:

“Proposals can combine any two elements – two images, an image and a text, image/text plus something live, image and audio (played over the cinema‘s soundsystem or via headphones) or anything else you/we can think of! but should not include any moving images or film/video works in a literal sense. You should imagine your proposal ‘appearing’ for up to 5 minutes. The idea is to suggest a new template of a unique kind of cinema that exploits what the [It’s Not The Homosexual…] programmes in March were also exploring: the way in which context and our act of reading works can become also content of our experience in the auditorium – how the two things we see/hear at the same time affect each other as somehow the material of the programme itself.”

The event had a marked impact on many of those who were present. Nearly a decade later, in March 2019, Kopietheater was posthumously revisited in a project, Ian White – Cinema as a Live Art / Becoming Object curated by Anne Breimaier on behalf of Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art for Arsenal Cinema and the cupola hall of silent green. This event brought together contributions by former participants, as well as newly invited artists.

“Kopietheater is an experiment in radical cinema and the culmination of a research project by London-based curator and artist Ian White. It explores the ways in which context and the act of reading can become the material content of our experience in the auditorium. In the Kopietheater film, video, still images, sound, text and performance are radically juxtaposed into unique, simultaneous presentations - a theatre of reproducible units proposed as fundamental cinema.

“Kopietheater follows a series of exploratory screenings and events in March 2009 under the title (borrowed from the Rosa von Praunheim film) It’s Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Situation In Which He Lives at Kino Arsenal and other venues. The title event from that series is re-presented here: a simultaneous screening of von Praunheim’s film – widely regarded as instigating the gay rights movement in Germany that is as incisive, hysterical and challenging an indictment of homogenized gay culture today as it was when it was made – alongside a series of photographs by the American artist Emily Roysdon; a re-gendered, contemporary version of a series by fellow American David Wojnarowicz (Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-9) to which they also pay homage. Affiliations, conflicts and questions flicker between the two.

“The screening is supported by a programme of work specially conceived for the event by artists, writers and theorists all of whom attended the original screenings in March, who were invited to propose two things that we would see, hear or read at the same time as each other for up to five minutes. As such they take the form of responses, critiques and new explorations. A new kind of cinema without a moving image: Kopietheater.” - Berlinale Forum Press Release

Programme details

Programme 1

Henrik Olesen, [no title], projected text, live spoken word over headphones

Rosa Barba, [no title], Digital image, audio, Image: Rosa Barba, Music: Max Müller

Anne Breimaier, Weston, Frampton and I, digital projection, live lecture

Klaus Weber, see, 2 x 35mm slide projectors

Rainer Bellenbaum, Reading Sebald, digital image, audio

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Playgirl 2012 Mandala, digital slideshow, live performance

Martin Ebner, In a sideshow by the sea, DVD video, audio

Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth

Florian Zeyfang, F66 Geisterschiff, video projection, 35mm slide projection

Judith Hopf, Contract social d`hommes et de l`ordinateur, digital projection, live lecture

Matei Bellu, Madeleine Bernstorff, Emilie Bujes, Guillaume Cailleau, in for a penny, in for a pound (oder wer a sagt muß auch b sagen), 16mm film, photocopied texts

Programme 2

Simultaneous presentation:

untitled (David Wojnarowicz project), Every Ocean Hughes f.k.a. Emily Roysdon, USA 2001-8, digital photographs

It’s Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Situation In Which He Lives, Rosa von Praunheim, West Germany 1970, 16mm, 67’

Followed by: Q&A with Ian White and Rosa von Praunheim in the auditorium and Every Ocean Hughes (f.k.a. Emily Roysdon) live from New York.

Further material

Download White’s original programme notes for the performances in part 1

Download the brochure for Ian White – Cinema as a Live Art / Becoming Object, organised by Anne Breimaier (brochure design by Harald Niessner)