Episode III by Renzo Martens

Screening of Episode III, a film by Renzo Martens, the artist who initiated the Institute for Human Activities, co-producers of the exhibition by the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise currently on view at the gallery.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with musician Robert Maseko, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art’s Curatorial Fellow Giles Maffett; and members of our young people’s group, The Wonder Whys.

In 2008 Martens shot this film in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As part of his process he encouraged local people to take photographs of their living conditions – controversially, even of undernourished children – and sell them to Western press outlets, thus monetising their situation. The film exposed the many failings of the Western aid industry, among them how even representations of poverty in Africa largely serve the financial purposes of the West.