— Video
Video still, Margarita Maximova, "Just Call Him and See If He Picks Up", 2018.

Margarita Maximova
Just Call Him and See If He Picks Up, 2018

We are happy to open this week by presenting Just Call Him and See If He Picks Up, a film by Berlin-based artist Margarita Maximova, the fourth part of our video program on Super Dakota website.

Just call him to see if he picks up thematizes the distortion of human emotional communication in the digital age. Here, we witness a digital chat that actually took place between two sisters, against a background of something that at first seems like a dull road movie. Through this work, Margarita Maximova warns about the dangers of the use of social media technology in communicating emotional messages. Such technology is of course without hierarchy in its own right, and every (emotional) impulse is communicated in real time, with the result – in this case tragic – of trivializing something that might otherwise have been profound sadness.

Courtesy of Margarita Maximova.

Margarita Maximova is a video artist who lives and works in Berlin. She won the 2014 Prize of the Friends of S.M.A.K. as part of the Coming People exhibition of recently graduated young artists.

Duration: 6 minutes 23 seconds, Single screen video.