In the video room Declan Clarke shows for the first time his new work entitled Nothing Human is Alien to Me. Declan Clarke repeatedly shows an interest in history and politics and the manner in which they impress themselves on everyday life. In former films he has analyzed the difference and similarities of the process of history, interweaving personal and historical trajectories. In an earlier work he recounts in a clear cut and calmed manner the correlation between the life and work of socialist Rosa Luxemburg and how his interest in her legacy has spilled into his own life. Proposing that Rosa Luxemburg would be a great name for his future child; the absurdity of such presumptious commemoration is recounted through his failures to maintain the circumstances in his personal life that would lead to such an outcome. Mine Are of Trouble, 2006, has been his entrance point into German history. His latest work, Nothing Human is Alien to Me (the favorite maxim of Karl Marx), this interest is developed further. According to Clarke he became interested in the processs of erasing the past as a part of the grand plan of the "Aufbau Ost" (Build-up East) which has as its aim to equalize the standards, both in industry and socially between the West and East of Germany. Re-development, for some reason, tends to tear down the past, or as the artist recounts:" I was interested in the former ‘Death Strip’ or ‘No Man’s Land’ that existed on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. While the wall was deconstructed and used mainly for road building, the site of the wall and the strip was left largely vacant until recently, when property developers have started to reclaim the area. I became interested in depictions of the Cold War both current and past and how this complex political stand-off was represented and was specifically drawn to John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and its subsequent filmed adaptation by Martin Ritt. This book was possibly the first mainstream western account of the Cold War that depicted both sides as duplicitous and largely detached from the ideological positions they outwardly maintained." The video depicts the present using B&W 16 mm film stock, while the past is represented using digitally fimed footage of personal, found or archive colour footage and images. According to the artist: "By using an outmoded means of recording to portray the contemporary settings and the most contemporary means of presenting the historical settings, the intention is to consider the complexities of depicting intricate and multi-layered political conflicts. A common assumption is that history becomes clarified through the benefit of hindsight. Nonetheless, each generation re-writes the past according to, and as a means of justifying, the ideological standing and viewpoints of the time. As countless reappraisals of the 20th Century are published each month perhaps we are less equipped to clearly evaluate the situation now than 50 years ago when the political landscape had roots that are no longer present in the 21st Century." Nothing Human is Alien to Me not only mirrors the quote its title refers to, it also tries to consider the problem of re-defining the past, and highlights the developments and gentrification processes that are instigated by state officials and private property developers alike. Keen to erase the past through reconstruction, these sites become re-politicized yet retain the haunted presence of their past history. The film poetically considers the complex structures that are put in motion in order to spark an economy and contrasts this with the physical space we ply our lives through. Declan Clarke was born in 1974 and studied at the National College of Art and Design (N.C.A.D.), Dublin, and Chelsea College of Art, London. In 2000 he was one of the recipients of the Saatchi Fellowship and in 2002 participated in the International Studio Programme at PS1 MOMA, New York. Recent exhibitions include; 2nd Moscow Bienniale, Moscow, Four Gallery, Dublin, Art Now, Tate Britain, London and the Swiss Institute, New York. He has recently, in collaboration with Paul McDevitt, guest-edited Printed Project Issue 9 entitled The Call of the Wild is now a Cry for Help. Clarke lives and reads in Dublin, London and Berlin.