Euphoria is the name of Julian Rosefeldt's long-awaited new multidisciplinary, expansive film installation, presented for the first time at the Ruhrtriennale 2022.

The Berlin-based artist is internationally renowned for his visually opulent and meticulously choreographed moving image artworks, mostly presented as complex multi-screen installations. Inspired equally by the histories of film, art and popular culture, Rosefeldt uses familiar cinematic tropes to carry viewers into surreal, theatrical realms, where the inhabitants are absorbed by the rituals of everyday life, employing humour and satire to seduce audiences into familiar worlds made strange. Rosefeldt holds a professorship in Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2011.

It is not the first time that the video artist and filmmaker has shown his works at the Ruhrtriennale. He already thrilled (not only) the Ruhrtriennale audience in 2015 and 2016 with In the Land of Drought and Manifesto. A look back at the past and a preview of what we can expect this year.

The film installation In the Land of Drought will be based on material selected from film images captured by Julian Rosefeldt for the concert of Joseph Haydn’s Die Schöpfung (The Creation). For this Rosefeldt is deliberately looking for locations which clearly express the so-called Anthropocene age: the period in which the impact of human activity on the nature of the earth is evident. The Berlin artist uses meditative tracking shots to follow the alignment of a globalized world and deconstruct the relationships between man and the environment, between culture and nature. The film installation will enter into a direct dialogue with the industrial surroundings of the Landschaftpark Duisburg-Nord.

In 2016 film artist Julian Rosefeldt presents a new installation co-produced by the Ruhrtriennale. In Manifesto Australian actress Cate Blanchett appears in thirteen different roles: as a news anchor, choreographer, homeless person or punk she recites manifestos from art history which combine to form a polyphonic plea for aesthetic change. Rosefeldt works with a visual vocabulary which calls to mind references to familiar Hollywood aesthetics, which it both ironizes and subverts. The imposing dimensions of the Duisburg Kraftzentrale now allow the visual worlds of Manifesto to unleash their full power.

Euphoria is a tour de force that runs through the history of economic theory. The project consists of original texts from famous economists, writers, philosophers and poets, and traces the 2,000-year history of human greed. He translates the complex history of the development of our neoliberal market economy into an accessible visual language through the combination of historical texts with familiar scenic representations, in which actors like Giancarlo Esposito and Virginia Newcomb appear as contemporary characters and Cate Blanchett provides the voice for a talking, singing tiger.

The project pursues the question of why capitalism appears, until now, to have no alternative and why it remains irresistible, even to people who are aware of its destructive nature, as a filmic re-enactment of both pro-capitalist and capitalist-critical positions.