Occupied City
From Sat 17 Feb to Sat 02 MarWhere do the memories of a city go?
From Oscar- and BAFTA-winning filmmaker and Turner Prize-winning visual artist Steve McQueen comes this mesmerising and monumental excavation of how the past haunts our precarious present: mirroring it and warning us in plain sight.
Informed by the rigorously researched and lauded Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, written by historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, Occupied City takes us to around 130 addresses in the city to uncover what occurred behind each window in those calamitous years. The emotional power of these stories lays bare the mechanics of both systematic oppression and sudden bravery; both calculated terror and life-saving luck; both ordinary and extraordinary ways of surviving.
Occupied City is a meditation on time, memory, and immediacy—history as something all around us, and something we continually create. It is also a highly personal journey, as we weave in and out of houses and memories, in and out of grief, indignation, and moments of joy, hearing history, seeing the recent world, and wondering about tomorrow.