10,000 Blinks presents: I AM STILL ALIVE

• 

  – Leslie Tai, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF FENFEN, USA / 2013

• 

  – Sophie Calle and Greg Shephard, Double Blind (No Sex Last Night)

in English
10,000 Blinks is an itinerant screening series for short film based between Berlin and Warsaw. It sets out to map formal strategies from throughout the 130 years of film and from within the 10,000 blinks of everyday perception.
I Am Still Alive is an evening of films celebrating the tonal hybridity—the commingling of the sublime and the banal, the everyday and the extraodinary—that characterises moving image artist’s diaries. It will include a series of short films in which this most intimate ritual of daily accounting and self-narration pivots from the depiction of one’s breakfast to the discussion of one’s innermost torments or the daily geopolitical headwinds. The programme’s five films together express the versatility of the video diary as a form:
Peter Watkins, The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, (1959), 17 min.
George Kuchar, Weather Diary 5, (1988), 38 min.
Leslie Tai, The Diary of FenFen, (2013), 29 min.
Diary Chat, The Year I Slept in My Car, 6 min.
Sophie Calle + Greg Shephard, Double Blind (No Sex Last Night), (1996), 76 min.
Each film will also be introduced by a selection of videos indexing the “psychic structure of now,” curated for this screening by Crisis.Acting.
10,000 Blinks is curated by George MacBeth and Ewa Winiarczyk
Monday 15th June, 2026:
Awoken at 6 again by the noise of downstair’s neverending renovation work. Terrible headache. Cut my pinkie chopping shallots for my packed lunch, then overshot Kurfurstensstraße on the U-Bahn to the office bc I was watching and rewatching a video on my phone of an Italian man kissing a 3D model of Shrek. Truly horrendous backlog of emails to catchup on at work. Headache began subsiding by early afternoon, but the whole day I couldn’t quite shrug off the nagging thought that the world I was raised to survive in no longer exists, that everything around me is smudging itself out before I’ve even had a chance to fully absorb it etc. etc. Met with K. and M. for dinner at an overhyped new small plates spot in Mitte (I mispronounced “endives”). K. had watched a documentary last night on Penicillin shortages, which didn’t exactly help with my unease.
The shadow hanging over this Monday, the background drilling echoing from the demolition work that woke me up, didn’t lift until earlier this evening, when I went to the grand hall in the Volksbühne for a screening event of short films calling itself 10,000 Blinks: I AM STILL ALIVE. I’m pretty sure the programmers nicked this title from an On Kawara piece, or something? I really didn’t know what to expect——I must have half-glanced at this event description on the VB site last week when I bought my tickets——and I’m still sort of processing everything as I type this up now. I don’t know if I’ve ever attended anything quite like this screening! I suppose it’s a little meta to confide this here, but the whole night was actually an inventory of video diaries. As I sat there in the Volksbühne, I began to feel like I was channel-hopping the collective unconscious; catching chance glimpses from a world tearing itself asunder in which all of us were somehow still here and yes, still alive.

Next date:

• Date Monday, 15/June/2026 22:00
• Venue Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz - Großes Haus
• Address Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 10178 Berlin-Mitte