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Josh Siegel, Lucy Gallun, Kaitlin Booher, Alex Bingham, Laura Israel

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Exhibition. Sep 15, 2024–May 18, 2025. Robert Frank is best known for his pictures of a postwar America riven by social and political discord, and for the films he made with the poets of the Beat Generation and the Rolling Stones. So the filmed images found only after Frank’s death in 2019 may surprise some viewers. Tucked away in storage places, these film canisters and tapes, containing footage that spans the years 1970 to 2006, offer insight into the artist’s life and work. In partnership with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Frank’s longtime film editor Laura Israel and the art director Alex Bingham have used these fragments to create a moving-image scrapbook. Featuring projections across multiple screens, the installation conveys the intimacy and immediacy of Frank’s observations of family, friends, and collaborators, as well as of domestic interiors and vistas of cities and coastlines. The footage in this installation, stitched together by Israel and Bingham to evoke his restless gaze and voice, sheds new light on his artistic process—at once comical and melancholy. We watch Frank journey between his homes in New York and Nova Scotia; down the open roads of the United States and Canada; and amid urban landscapes, including those of Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, and his native Switzerland. Frank makes the most fleeting of pleasures timeless: a warm bath and a steaming tea kettle, a glimpse of his wife June Leaf in her studio, the play of sunlight on his hand.

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Parallel Realities “Hello everyone,” says Katya Inozemtseva, chief curator at Garage. “Very nice to at least see you digitally.” She keeps one hand in her pocket as she blinks and

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The art student was shocked. The carefully prepared presentation collapsed under a surprisingly simple if not quite obvious question the visiting guest professor posed: Why do your paintings look like those of a fifty-year-old man? Why would a well-educated young artist want to emulate the historic gesture of a different generation?

Today, what strikes me in Isa Genzken's work is exactly what Tino Sehgal ridiculed in his contribution for the German pavilion in Venice, the dancing wardens and their hysterical chit chat of "This is so contemporary." Today this is what I greatly admire in Genzken's work, the way it is there, with a resonating presence, and that it is so obviously not classic, not imposing, not spectacular, and indeed contemporary. In fact the work of this fifty-year-old artist appears more youthful than most of what much younger artists produce today. Full of disparate, if occasionally idiosyncratic elegance, it is armed with a charming ridiculousness and ruthlessness, effortlessly pairing minimalist purity with decoration, in rickety assemblages of everyday souvenirs, featuring precise spray-paint attacks on high-design objects, all stacked hideously on high white plinths, allowing a weirdly playful improvisational streak to shine through with narrative fragments and careful constructions. Sculptures they are, but of parts that stubbornly reclaim their place; they never really come together and instead remain instable. Probably the most precarious work the artist has ever produced.

However another piece comes to mind, in all its clarity, scale and composure - quite the opposite of her latest work: a five meter high, thin, high-grade steel frame entitled Camera, from 1990. Very much a private work, but by leaning dangerously from a private, third-floor balcony, it assumes public significance, referring not only to the rectangular modern architecture and the context it is placed in, but also the frame of a camera's viewfinder, the frame that directs the eye. Seen from street level in Brussels, this piece looks like a rather suicidal sculpture, on the brink of falling. What is striking in it is the way the world is split into what is inside and outside of the frame, just as the viewer's perspective is split into the private looking down, like the viewfinder of the camera, framing the public, and the public perspective, of the passerby, looking up, threatened by the potentially dangerous tilting metal frame looming over him.

The concept of a point of view, a perspective, an act of framing on account of the viewer is as evident in Camera as it is in the Window sculptures presented in the solo show at Frankfurt's Portikus in 1992 - a traveling exhibition with other stations in various places, among them the Renaissance Society in Chicago - with the evocatively shimmering and metaphorical title "Everyone needs at least one window." These sculptures - single, doubled or quadrupled frames of reinforced epoxy-resin casts, sometimes on the skinny stilted pedestals familiar from her earlier concrete pieces - deal with openness and closure, with transparency and translucency by revealing their inner, supporting structures, plain, steal-wire mesh or grids. Their framing constructs an overlapping of inside and outside, resulting in a tautological short circuit, wherein layers of meaning reconstruct each other, and thereby expose with perfect conceptual clarity a notion of fragility that belies the ruggedness of the actual construction. Perhaps it is something about the idea of reinforcement as such that subverts the simplicity of the applied cubic geometry and its symbolic levels, appropriated by modern architecture, most notably since the Bauhaus. All these imposing cubes, rectangles and grids, with all their calculated reflections and transparency, imply classic, predominantly male values: straightness, clarity, resolve. So, consequently Genzken's answer was "Fuck the Bauhaus," the title of a group of works that are predecessors to her most recent body of work.

But Genzken's concept of geometry has always been fluid - the chaotic elegance of her current works echoes the surprising volatility of her early, elongated ellipsoids and hyperbolas from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today it appears difficult to believe that these forms were made before Photoshop. However, in a time dominated by hot "Neue Wilde" painting and a nearly all-male cast of more or less macho painters, Genzken, like Hanne Darboven before her, turned to the soothing coolness of mathematics and used computers for complex sinus-calculations to develop her suggestive abstract objects. Painted in bright colors, they are physical, but in a strange way also from out of this world. Scientific, nearly weightless and touching the floor at only one point, they hover in a precarious equilibrium. Like musical instruments or sporting equipment, say, surfboards, an abstract and impossible mechanical idea of functionality emanates from them, while they occupy their space less than they bend it, proving too big for any context.

Already this period shows the artist as a sculptor who aspires toward complex ideas and to wrangle the concept of sculpture from the hands of minimalists and take it to completely new places; this remains her game today. With great panache - or "with her almost Herculean ambition," as Benjamin H.D. Buchloh said in an article published in Artforum) - Genzken managed to develop her practice inside of a specific historic vacuum concerning sculpture in Germany.

She was wedged between the overpowering ideas of minimal art coming from the US and the influence of the Düsseldorf scene, with the highly influential godfather Joseph Beuys and the rest of the Düsseldorf gang - from her former husband Gerhard Richter and his pals Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo to the then-upcoming generation of photographers, such as Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth at the famed Bernd and Hilla Becher school. Questioning the masculine notion of sculpture as such drove her to take upon her own shoulders the task of finding a new way to make sculpture all by herself. Without any predecessor, she went through the motions, and came up with one potent idea after another, ruthlessly discarding her approaches when she found them dissatisfying or no longer in accord with her vision, subjecting her works and ideas to rigorous and intense examination.

Given the mathematical precision of her early sculptures, the autonomy and tight rectangular rational at work in her concrete and frame pieces, her latest work looks like it has spiraled out of control: the artist's hand is everywhere, the arrangements are overpowering, involving a surprising personal sensibility, humor, suggestions of adoration and campy seduction. Alluring from their pedestals, her concoctions come from the real world of the everyday and carry with them no irony but a comic touch, in the way that the cheap mass-produced perfection of her objects clashes with expensive design and artifacts. This is what happens for instance with a leporello by her Cologne-based artist friend Kai Althoff, which was draped around and woven into the structure of her sculpture Pope (2006) - shown in her recent exhibition of four stelae at her Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider. The poignancy of mundane activities and their apparent contrast with modernist rationalism allows her to use a certain friction to portray a schizophrenic state of interference and exchangeability. Agilely mixing styles, high and low culture, she allows fashion accessories to comment on concepts about modernism, urbanism and sculpture.

Genzken invites the viewer to witness arrangements of residue from everyday life that turn into provisional hybrid forms - including toys, kitsch figurines, colored glass, souvenirs and other knick-knacks - that mount up into altar-like complexes, transcending the idea of experimental architectural models. They remain flexible, similarly influenced by the egalitarian strategies of punk and dada as well as scatter-art, gaining their momentum in the obvious pleasure taken in the campy qualities reflected in the abundance of shiny materials, glossy, transparent or reflective surfaces and the decorative metallic and glitter spray paint employed to add some extra sparkle and friction - "plenty of sand in the Vaseline," to quote Martin Kippenberger. Indeed, Genzken's precarious structures are reminiscent of Kippenberger's Psychobuildings - a book featuring a series of photographs of existing architecture that question the either plainly idiotic or really psychotic society that created them. In a complex reversal, Genzken's sculptures reflect more of an individual state of tension, caught between the perception from the inside and the outside, but are just as slapstick as they are psychotic.

In her New Buildings for Berlin, the relatively small slates of resin-encoated wire lean on each other like diminutive Richard Serra sculptures, and are often placed close to windows to emphasize their translucent character. It is precisely here that her metaphorical gesture, informed by a lightness, the allure of the surface, the way of arranging and placing her work, prevents her from producing what could be defined as 'painting,' thanks also to the combination of extremely diverse elements. Abandoning notions of order and finally power, they allow the viewer to relate to their human scale with their powerful symbolism of fragility, haphazardness and poetry. Things remain light, easy; the elements are barely held together by hot glue, adhesive tape and cling-wrap. No weightiness, no imposing form, but a distinctively anarchist DIY idea.

Similar to the catastrophes of painting technique that are the trademark of much bad painting, the clashes in Genzken's work are part of her narrative, unfolding simultaneously on many symbolic, metaphorical and allegorical levels. The world she shows is falling apart, it can't contain the things in it anymore, because implicit notions of structure and order have become obsolete.

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The art student was shocked. The carefully prepared presentation collapsed under a surprisingly simple if not quite obvious question the visiting guest professor posed: Why do your paintings look like

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Sarah Sze: Timelapse | Gagosian Quarterly

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Théo Mercier: Mirrorscape | 15 February - 26 April 2025

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Excited to reveal the 80 ton sculpture by Théo Mercier commissioned by Olivier Varenne for MONA in Tasmania. In MONA’s words: “We’ve dug up Mona’s old library, figuratively speaking, and had the hole filled by Théo Mercier—a French artist and stage director with a captivating process and a crack team…

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The Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris is presenting an exhibition devoted to artist Danh Vo, born in Vietnam in 1975. Appearing highly personal at first glance, the work of Danh Vo is in fact powerfully political. Neither direct nor confrontational, his practice explores the power games underlying liberal societies, the rules governing those societies, and the fragility of the nation-state idea. Built around the circulation of values, be they material, economic, symbolic or spiritual, the artist’s oeuvre reveals, too, the complexity of the interchange between peoples in the context of post-colonial society.

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Art-Book Featuring
Club of Opportunities Project
With Essays by Invited Authors

The book uncovers the themes addressed in the Club of Opportunities, an episodic project created by artist Jakub Jansa, starring hybrid human-vegetable creatures who question authority and cultural and class relationships. Through the texts of the invited authors (Michal Novotný, Julie Béna, Kamil Nábělek, Noemi Purkrábková, Jozef Mrva Jr., Ernestyna Orlowska, Klára Vlasáková, Jan Bělíček), we get to the bottom of multiple problems - with celeriac ontology, black magic, humour, losing vision of the future and especially with taking root. Jakub Jansa works in various media ranging from film to sculptural elements, installations and live performances. Each of the exhibition events tends to merge with the architecture of the space they inhabit. They are reminiscent of film or TV sets where the narrative gradually unfolds through a carefully designed dramaturgy of various elements (video, objects, live action) while we - the visitors - move through the space.

Title: Club of Opportunities: The Garden of Problems
Book language: English-Czech edition
Author: Jakub Jansa
Designed by: Martin Groch, 20YY Designers
Publisher: UMPRUM
ISBN: 978-80-88308-55-3
Binding: paperback
Number of pages: 276

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Jakub Jansa is an artist working in various media ranging from film to sculptural elements, installations and live performances. His practice crosses the boundaries of genres from drama to absurd comedy and employs fiction, humour and elements of the grotesque to develop complex exhibition environments that tell stories about today's social struggles.

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2011 is a portrait of the analogue, photochemical, non-digital medium of film, made by the artist Tacita Dean. It is silent, lasts 10 minutes and 42 seconds, and is played on a continuous loop. Dean made by turning a Cinemascope lens ninety degrees, upending the usual landscape format so it becomes vertical and in scale with the proportions of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, for which the work was commissioned in 2011 as part of the Unilever Series. It has been produced in an edition of four, of which Tate's copy is number one. FILM depicts Tate Modern, however many of the scenes are overlaid with scratches and paint or oversaturated with colour. It has sprocket holes evocative of the analogue medium down the left- and right-hand sides. When the work was shown as part of the Unilever Series in 2011-12, it was projected on a specially made screen on the eastern wall of the Turbine Hall.

To produce the various visual effects in FILM Dean used both in-camera and studio techniques, such as masking, double-exposure and glass matte painting. Dean's edit of the material, as well as her additions and manipulations, established a relationship between the artist's hand and the mechanically produced film. The effect is playful and intimate, reminding us of the pro-filmic event - the real situation happening in front of the camera - even when projected on a monumental scale. The ad-hoc nature of the images also points to the early days of cinema, even though the film used was some of the last to be produced at the Kodak factory and so might also be seen as a lament for a nearly extinct process. In the press release for the display of FILM at Tate Modern, Dean commented that the work aimed, 'to show film as film can be - film in its purest form' ('The Unilever Series 2011: Tacita Dean', press release, Tate, 10 October 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/unilever-series-2011-tacita-dean, accessed 25 June 2018). Critic Adrian Searle, writing in the Guardian newspaper, described it as: 'A silent movie, Film is a rejoinder to the digital noise of the modern world. It recalls early cinema and experiments with colour, cinema as art abstraction and as home movie, structuralist film and underground cinema. It is cool and passionate, lovely and weirdly old-fashioned.' (Adrian Searle, 'Tacita Dean: Film - Review, Guardian, 10 October 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/oct/10/tacita-dean-film-review, accessed 25 June 2018.)

As FILM was projected on a screen in the Turbine Hall, the architecture of Tate Modern became an integral element of the work. The steel beams which clad the walls also structured the composition of the various montage shots, while the long and narrow series of windows on the far wall recalled the strips of film, offering the viewer a complex interweaving of film and setting, real and artificial world. More broadly, like the fate of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's disused power station - an obsolete structure that found a new lease of life as a museum - Dean's film reflected the fate imposed upon the medium of film as it migrates from the cinema to find its last refuge within the gallery's walls.

FILM has the rhythm and metre of a visual poem. Images, some familiar from Dean's previous works, such as lightning, trees and seascapes, are juxtaposed with panels of colour and interact with the grid structure of the wall. The resulting piece is a montage of black and white, colour and hand-tinted images, which includes allusions to surrealist art, a painting by Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian, the mountains of René Daumal's novel Mount Analogue and the mountain logo of Paramount Studios. Dean's characteristic celebration of what is normally considered waste in filmmaking, such as the picture fading at the tail end of a roll, flash frames of over-exposure as the camera stops and starts, and the shimmering metamorphosis of a colour filter change, are also evident in this work. Although she works across a wide range of media, Dean has used film throughout her career - it is her working material, and she has stated that she needs 'the stuff of film as a painter needs the stuff of paint' (quoted in Charles Darwent, 'Tacita Dean, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London', Independent, 16 October 2011, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/tacita-dean-turbine-hall-tate-modern-london-2371148.html, accessed 25 June 2018).

Further reading
Nicholas Cullinan (ed.), Tacita Dean: FILM, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2011.

Nicholas Cullinan
November 2011
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Installations | Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

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Saint Lucy is an online publication by Mark Alice Durant devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art.

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Dorit Margreiter | Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

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Dorit Margreiter. For over a decade, the artist Dorit Margreiter (Vienna, 1967) has been reflecting on modern architecture, on its preservation and its destruction, and on the relationship between visual systems and the economic and social contexts of architecture. Her activity shows a connection with that of a generation of Austrian artists, such as Florian Pümhosl, Martin Beck and Mathias Poledna, who, with the specific condition of the artistic medium as their point of departure, meditate on recent history and on the social and political weight of modernity, thus diluting its formal specificity.

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The exhibition by the artist Rosa Barba in the Cukrarna basement gallery marks the start of a series of projects exploring the dimensions and possible applications of sound, light, moving images, and music.

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Uncover Candice Breitz’s Artworks, Shows and Bio • kaufmann repetto

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Check out Candice Breitz’s latest works, selected museum exhibitions and her astonishing moving image installations famous worldwide

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bořijovova 85, prague 3 – žižkov, czech republic

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Eva Koťátková (born 1982 in Prague) takes as her central theme the individual's relationship to normative social structures and institutions, such as the government, school, or the family.

In her sculptures, performances, drawings, and collages, she gives form to the invisible, disciplining force exerted by rules, conventions, and rituals: Cage-like objects, acting as physical restraints for body parts, cut-out illustrations from medical textbooks, and images of people tangled up in strings are recurring motifs in her work. Poetic, darkly humorous, and occasionally ominous, Koťátková counts Czech surrealism and absurdist literature among her sources of inspiration. For this exhibition at the MIT List Visual Art's Center, her first solo museum show in the United States, she is creating several new groups of works-from collages and drawings, to installation and sculpture-which build upon her signature visual vocabulary.

Eva Koťátková: Out of Sight is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Support for this exhibiiton has been generously provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the LIst. Special thanks to Meyer Riegger, Berlin and Karlsruhe.

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Eva Koťátková: Out of Sight | MIT List Visual Arts Center

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Eva Koťátková takes as her central theme the individual's relationship to normative social structures and institutions, such as the government, school, or the family.

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The Mindful Hand is Belgian artist Eva L'Hoest's first monographic exhibition in an institutional setting. The exhibition consists of a series of new works that question the ways in which analogue and digital image-making technologies influence our perception and our memory, modifying the notion of landscape and redrawing the boundaries between manual gesture and the mind.

Eva L'Hoest's composite artworks mix together craftsmanship and digital techniques, the human gesture becoming an extension of the machine. A series of sculptures revisits the ancient techniques of lifecasting through the medium of 3D printing, while artificial intelligence and computer-generated images intrude on the film in a new audiovisual installation. The film is projected simultaneously across four walls, transporting us into empty domestic and institutional interiors, both real and artificial, as these morph through images taken from cinema.

Accompanied by the words of poet Eva Manusco, the exhibition The Mindful Hand questions the capacity for digital technologies to redefine language, the mechanisms of our desires, and the sometimes invisible tensions between human intention and the autonomy of machines.

Eva L'Hoest is a Belgian artist who uses digital language as an archaeological tool to question notions of origin and memory. Combining sculpture, performance, and audiovisual installation, she explores how collective and individual mental images can be reactivated and reanimated in technological forms. She has shown her work in museums, art centers, and biennales, including KANAL - Centre Pompidou (Brussels, 2023), the Sydney Biennale (2021), WIELS (Brussels, 2021), the Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2020), the Lyon Biennale (2019), and the Okayama Art Summit (2019). L'Hoest has been a resident at ISCP (New York, 2023), the Biennale College of Art (Venice, 2022), Meetfactory (Prague, 2015), and in 2023 she was awarded the Edward Steichen Prize. Her work was presented as a performance at IFFR 2020 and in a visual piece accompanying the Belgian Philharmonic Orchestra at BOZAR (Brussels, 2022).

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Eva L'Hoest at Casino Luxembourg - Art Viewer

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The Mindful Hand is Belgian artist Eva L'Hoest's first monographic exhibition in an institutional setting. The exhibition consists of a series of new works tha

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The museum was not real. The objects here did not belong to the people that the inscriptions said they did; the house did not have the history that was claimed for it; even the audio tour, asserting that the curator worked with an imaginary character, was threaded with fiction.

At least, I had thought so. But now, as I stood in the museum's penthouse - looking at the modest bed where the novel's protagonist, Kemal, is said to have first slept with Füsun, the object of his obsession; where an inscription says that Kemal passed away here on 12 April 2007; and where displayed pages of the author's notes are described as notes from the interviews he did with Kemal - I wasn't so sure. Perhaps it wasn't a novel at all. Perhaps there had been a real Kemal. Perhaps I'd missed something.

The Museum of Innocence may be the most creatively daring project of Turkey's most daring living author. Awarded the title of European Museum of the Year in May 2014, the Museum of Innocence is a museum, based on a novel, based on a museum. All share the same name. And all seep with the life and culture of Istanbul in the second half of the 20th Century.

In the mid-1990s, even before Orhan Pamuk, the concept's creator, author and curator, had received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels, including 1998's My Name Is Red and 2002's Snow, he was embarking on a secret project. He was gathering objects, the sorts of everyday flotsam and jetsam that marked Istanbul in the second half of the 20th Century: salt shakers, old photographs, a quince grater. But he was assembling more than a collection. "I wanted to collect and exhibit the 'real' objects of a fictional story in a museum and to write a novel based on those objects, Pamuk writes in The Innocence of Objects, the museum's guide. "At the time, I did not know what sort of place the museum would be, and neither did I know the shape the novel would take. But I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul."

If my confusion in the museum's penthouse was any indication, Pamuk had succeeded.

Pamuk started collecting his objects in earnest the mid-1990s. In 2002, while still collecting, he began to work on a novel linking those objects to fictional protagonists. At the same time, he dreamed of setting up a museum to showcase the same objects, even though, at first, he admitted it sounded as if he had "lost the plot": "At first, whenever anyone asked what I was going to do with the stuff that I was accumulating, I was unable to answer them. 'I will build a museum, and its catalogue will be a novel' seemed too ambitious a response," he writes. "Its strangeness, its oddity, and the difficulty of realising it scared me."

But, of course, he did realise his goal. Published in 2008, The Museum of Innocence was Pamuk's first novel after receiving the Nobel Prize in 2006. A tragic tale of class and gender inequality, the novel depicts the fixation of the protagonist, Kemal, on a young woman named Füsun - an obsession that drives him to collect every possible object that she associates with. And the museum itself opened to the public four years later, in 2012.

In a neat trick played at the end of the novel, Kemal uses those objects to form the nucleus of a real-life museum, and hires an old acquaintance, the writer Orhan Pamuk, to write his story. And, in an even neater trick - and the reason, beyond creative sleight-of-hand, that the museum has received such recognition by the academic community - the objects of Füsun and Kemal provide a rarely seen slice-of-life look at 20th-century Turkey.

As I sought out the museum, a blood-red, Ottoman-style wooden house on a back street in the hilly Beyoğlu neighbourhood of Çukurcuma, I noted ruefully that I perfectly fit the novel's description of the museum's eventual visitors: "the single women who end up in the museum having lost their way in the street". When I finally arrived, I marvelled for a moment. I knew the house wasn't really the house of Füsun's family, as the book said it was. But it looked just as I'd imagined.

At the ticket window, I slid my well-thumbed novel across to the woman, open to the page where, talking about the future museum, Kemal decided that the ticket should be printed within the book itself. She smiled and stamped the page in the shape of a butterfly: a nod to both the first chapter of the novel, in which Füsun loses a butterfly-shaped earring, and to the first object in the collection.

Focussing on ordinary objects, of course, was Pamuk's aim all along. His "modest manifesto for museums", which greets visitors at the entrance, explains that most modern museums are large and state-sponsored, displaying the fruits of grand (often elite) achievements. "These institutions, now national symbols, present the story of the nation - history, in a word - as being far more important than the stories of individuals," he writes. "We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane, and much more joyful." Museums, he says, should be more like novels. And "the future of museums is inside our own homes."

One of the most arresting display cases, for example, was of trash. In particular, cigarette butts - 4,213 in total - spreading across an illuminated, wall-sized panel. All were smoked, both the novel and museum said, by Füsun. Each had dates and annotations written by Kemal detailing what Füsun had done or said to Kemal that day. An oddly mesmerising video ran nearby that showed the elegant hand of a woman as she smoked. Anthropologists agree, Pamuk said through the audio tour, that in Istanbul, where so many people smoke, "the linked actions of hiding and lighting a cigarette, flicking the ash off its end and stubbing it out all form a particular sign language of vast significance."

After all, focusing on individuals and domestic life, rather than elites, is an idea already pervasive in academia. Applying it to museums is both a smart and natural next step. Still, I found it odd that a museum so focused on everyday individuals - the kind often ignored by history - never gave voice to the most voiceless character or group in the whole novel: women like Füsun. There's a clear nostalgia that both Kemal and Pamuk have for the old Istanbul that's conveyed in these objects - black-and-white images of old ships on the Bosphorus, photographs of footballers that used to come with packs of chewing gum, bottles of the briefly-popular Turkish soft drink Meltem. But if the museum were to have been put together not by Kemal but by, let's say, Füsun, whose life is ruined by that same old Istanbul and its rules, that nostalgia would probably look quite different.

Still, even as art alone, the displays were impressive. And they were art: each of the cases held a striking blend of objects chosen for both historical merit and emotional resonance, creating a surrealist twist. One, for example, for the chapter called "Silence", displayed Füsun's white panties, socks and sneakers, all back-dropped by an image of kissing seagulls from a 17th-century manuscript; Kemal associated kissing with "visions of a mother seagull putting food into her impatient chicks' open beaks" as well as "of a seagull gently holding a fig in its beak," Pamuk writes. Another showed an image of an oil fire on the Bosphorus, with a glass of çay (black Turkish tea) and simit (a sesame-encrusted bread ring) - what Kemal said he was eating while he watched the fire - suspended in front of it.

That blending, of course, is exactly the idea. Nothing is more important than anything else. Every detail and memory matters. And the fictional is authentic; the authentic, fictional.

As I left, I hesitated at the ticket desk. "I just have to ask..." I said. "There was no real Kemal, was there?"

The woman smiled at me, just as she had when she'd stamped my ticket. "If you think there was a real Kemal," she said, "then there was."

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The museum was not real. The objects here did not belong to the people that the inscriptions said they did; the house did not have the history that was claimed for it; even the audio tour, asserting that the curator worked with an imaginary character, was threaded with fiction.

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Some directors like John Cassavetes and Wong Kar-wai like to discover the movie as they are making it. Others filmmakers have a very clear conception of the movie right from the beginning. Alfred Hitchcock was very much in that latter category. "Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon not make the film at all," he once told Roger Ebert. "I have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts." And that is very much evident in the final product. From the famous Psycho shower scene to a wild-eyed Jimmy Stewart dangling from a ledge in Vertigo to Cary Grant being menaced by a crop duster in North By Northwest, Hitchcock has produced some of the most memorable, arresting images of the 20th Century.

British artist Dave Pattern set out to highlight Hitch's visual genius with his 1000 Frames of Hitchcock series, which compresses each of Hitchcock's 52 major movies down to a mere 1000 frames. That's about six seconds of running time.

"It all started when in 2003 I made a website that tries to gather information about Hitchcock DVD releases over the world," Pattern told Danish movie magazine . "The quality of the publications are very different from country to country. It sort of snowballed from there."

What's amazing about this project is just how much of the movie comes through in this greatly abbreviated, soundless version. You completely understand that Tippi Hedren is getting terrorized by an implacable enemy in The Birds. You don't even need to see that malevolent murder of crows. You can see it just in her face. At the beginning of the movie, she's elegant, aloof and perfectly composed. At the end of the film, she's unkempt, bloody and broken. Hitchcock's creepy sexual politics and his famously unwholesome obsession with blondes shines through here.

What is utterly apparent in this project - and something you might miss while watching the movie -- is Hitchcock's complete control of color. The palette of The Birds (middle image) is dominated by the color green, from Hedren's outfit to the color of a pickup truck to the hue of the hills. North By Northwest (bottom), by contrast, is composed mostly of beige and slate blue. Click on the images to view them in a larger format.

Below, you can check out all the movies, each distilled down to 1,000 frames. And, if you're inspired to dive deep into the works of the Master of Suspense, you can watch 23 of Alfred Hitchcock's movies for free here.

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1000 Frames of Hitchcock: See Each of Alfred Hitchcock's 52 Films Reduced to 1,000 Artistic Frames

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Some directors like John Cassavetes and Wong Kar-wai like to discover the movie as they are making it. Others filmmakers have a very clear conception of the movie right from the beginning. Alfred Hitchcock was very much in that latter category.

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'Michelangelo Antonioni. Il maestro del cinema moderno', installation view, 2013

Much has been made over the past few decades of the death of film as a material and its probable repercussions on the creation and analysis of the moving image. Two recent film-related exhibitions in Brussels offered some insight into these concerns. At BOZAR, a retrospective dedicated to Michelangelo Antonioni engaged with the visual style and social and psychological forces at play in the oeuvre of one of the most influential filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century, while WIELS presented a group show of recent works that straddle the categories of moving image and sculpture.

'Michelangelo Antonioni. Il maestro del cinema moderno', curated by Dominique Païni, the former director of the Cinémathèque in Paris, routed visitors through a series of rooms dedicated to key periods in the Italian director's career. The show began with what Païni terms the 'existential trilogy' of L'Avventura (The Adventure, 1960), La Notte (The Night, 1961) and L'Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962). These three films star Antonioni's muse, Monica Vitti, whose inscrutable face, hooded eyes and porcelain skin convey the secrecy and charisma of her characters. Antonioni's career-long engagement with themes of disappearance, absence and invisibility began in earnest with the trilogy, and reached its crescendo with Blow-Up (1966). In each part of the trilogy, something vital disappears: a girl, love, the sun; whereas in Blow-Up, key components of the plot, down to the protagonist himself, seem to disappear. Using film stills, clips, memorabilia and personal effects, the exhibition created a dynamic environment that also allowed space for reflection, something that isn't possible with the immediate temporality of projected films. The show moved on through rooms dedicated to Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, 1964), Blow-Up, and Antonioni's sandy 1970s films Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975), both set in atmospheres as dry as touch-paper. Then it digressed into spaces devoted to Antonioni's early and late films, whose woolliness put into even sharper relief the groundbreaking nature of his 1960s work.

In the early 1960s, Antonioni started painting miniature watercolours, which he called 'Montagne Incantate' (Enchanted Mountains). Although he never considered himself a serious painter, he returned to them throughout his career. He would enlarge these tiny works, some barely a few centimetres across, into prints of up to two metres, revealing the arid or misty landscapes and coloured deserts formed by his brush, and extracting latent visual information. This gesture echoes a scene in Blow-Up in which David Hemmings's character happens upon a dead body in his photograph, a discovery that drives the rest of the film. Antonioni's 'Montagne Incantate' are one facet of a persistent engagement with the relationship between the visible and the invisible - in the photographic apparition of a corpse in Blow-Up, the vanishing of a woman's serenity in Deserto Rosso or in the essence of photography itself. Païni's exhibition embodied these philosophical enquiries by first showing the 'Montagne' uncaptioned, and later with a full explanation of Antonioni's painting practice. What at first seemed to be a decorative flourish of the exhibition design eventually emerged as the linchpin of Antonioni's practical and theoretical work.

At WIELS, 'Film as Sculpture', curated by Elena Filipovic, was devoted to the new ways in which contemporary artists address the crossover between film and sculpture. Filipovic includes video in her understanding of 'film', yet while celluloid-based works by contemporary artists Rosa Barba, Ulla von Brandenburg and Elad Lassry were, in turn, impressive, delightful and exquisite, the exhibition's preponderance of obsolete technologies led it down the backward-looking, elegiac path taken by so many recent shows concerned with the legacies and lacunae of Modernism.

Group shows of moving images present particular challenges in terms of respecting the boundaries of individual works, but this show successfully negotiated potential pitfalls by placing pieces together in such a way that one work's soundtrack enveloped several silent films without disturbing them too much. Many of them incorporated specially built environments: for example, Von Brandenburg's 16mm film The Objects (2009) was sheltered by her large canvas work Segel (2012). Karthik Pandian's 35mm slide installation Carousel (2012) got its own space behind an enormous red velvet curtain. Barba's White Museum (2010), a blank loop of 70mm film, was projected every evening from the fourth floor of the museum onto the crossroads below, illuminating a stage for nothing in particular. The projector itself, a massive anthropomorphic machine, rather than the floodlit square, was the scene-stealer of this work.

Just before disappearing into a cloud of celluloid nostalgia, the show was reinvigorated by two colourful and amusing digital video sculptures by Rachel Harrison, ushering in the world of home video and online mash-ups. In AA (2010), which includes the video American Apparel (2009), footage of performers and audience at a county fair in upstate New York was projected at an angle from a yellow trolley onto a gigantic yellow T-shirt stretched over a wooden box. Reading the heavily skewed video off the brightly coloured T-shirt evoked the surrealism of trips to small-town events. The whole thing was a welcome bathetic poke at the self-conscious grace of the rest of the show.
But none of it quite matched the brilliance with which Antonioni made his images move, the way he analyzed the complexity of our contemporary visual environment, or the sensitivity with which he portrayed his characters' psychopathologies. The meaning and affect of his films matter more than the fact that they were shot on film, or later on video. By taking popular culture, human nature and philosophy equally seriously, Antonioni's films became landmarks of modern art. Today, they continue to feel just as contemporary as they ever did.

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Michelangelo Antonioni / Film as Sculpture

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Much has been made over the past few decades of the death of film as a material and its probable repercussions on the creation and analysis of the moving image. Two recent film-related exhibitions in Brussels offered some insight into these concerns.

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Portrait #3 [ Antonioni & Vitti]
Installation view Galerie Crone, Berlin 2015
Photo: Marcus Schneider

Portrait #3 [out-take | monica vitti | sculpture]

Portrait #3 [out-take | monica vitti | sculpture] is a hybrid work between an architectural sculpture and a video installation

Portrait #3 [out-take | monica vitti | sculpture] is dedicated to one of the major film director and best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents". Michelangelo Antonioni redefined the concept of narrative cinema producing enigmatic and intricate mood pieces favouring contemplation and focusing on image over story, as in Red Desert (1964). Antonioni's first film in colour is a film about a woman trying to survive in the modern world of cultural neurosis and existential doubt. Renowned for its scenic design, the work largely takes place in industrial landscapes that have been interpreted as a correlative of the unease, alienation, and vivid perceptions of the main character, Giuliana (Monica Vitti).

Peter Welz uses a sculptural and architectural device made out of steel - often found as a spacial device in modern architecture - deriving its basic structure at the 'Kino International' in Berlin, a premiere cinema of the former GDR. The artist replaces the design of the destroyed panels, originally in glass, by white wooden panels as a projection screen.

The slats and panels cut up the projected image depending on the position of the viewer in space, so that the video projection is visible as a whole only at one particular viewpoint, otherwise split up and is rearranged anew by the given structure. The projected video sequence focuses on a very crucial moment of Red Desert, when Monica Vitti is asked to cry. It is the most vulnerable, private and powerless moment, and the very point where the fictional reality overlaps with the actual reality. During the filming Michelangelo Antonioni corrects the scene by walking into the frame twice and finally neglects this sensible moment in the final version, as it would have altered the whole outcome.

With the great support by the Museo Michelangelo Antonioni and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Ferrara.

Screen-test #1 | Monica Vitti | gaze [slow motion]
HD projection 4:3, CF-player, canvas | photo print on canvas, black acrylic
Installation view Galerie Crone, Berlin 2015
Photo: Marcus Schneider

Portrait #3 [film as sculpture]

Artist Fims at Kino International, Berlin

Portrait #3 [out-take | Monica Vitti | onto cinema curtain]
35 mm transfered onto HD, projection onto white & glitter cinema curtain,
Kino International, Berlin 2016
Photo: Sabrina Tenório Luna

Portrait #3 [out-take | Monica Vitti | onto architectural device]
35 mm transfered onto HD, CF player, projector, architectural device
iInstallation view Kino International, Berlin 2016
Photo: Bernd Borchardt
Portrait #3 [out-take | Monica Vitti | onto architectural device]
35 mm transfered onto HD, CF player, projector, architectural device
photo: peter welz | studio 2019

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Portrait #3 [ Antonioni & Vitti]Installation view Galerie Crone, Berlin 2015Photo: Marcus Schneider Portrait #3 [out-take | monica vitti | sculpture] is a hybrid work between an architectural sculpture and a video installation Portrait #3 [out-take | monica vitti | sculpture] is dedicated to one of the major film director and best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents".

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Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė at FUTURA, Prague

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Artists: Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė Title: Sunk into it, part of it / it would be like hearing the grass grow, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silenceCurator: Carol…

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Magali Reus Exhibitions: Magali Reus: Parallel Bones, KM21, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, November 2, 2024 - March 9, 2025; Magali Reus: Our Volumes, Kunstmuseum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany, July 14 - October 6, 2024; Magali Reus: Off Script, Museo del Novecento Milan, April 10 - June 30, 2024; Magali Reus: Deeper Green,…

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Lucy Raven’s distinct and methodical practice combines an extended and interdisciplinary enquiry into the form, function and apparatus of the moving image –…

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Douglas Gordon, West 21st Street, New York, November 14, 2017–February 3, 2018

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Find out more about the exhibition Douglas Gordon at West 21st Street, New York. Installation views, editorial content, press, and more.

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Steve McQueen - Works | Thomas Dane Gallery

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Works by Steve McQueen: Portrait as an Escapologist , 2006, Charlotte , 2004, Girls Tricky , 2001, Deadpan , 1997, Weight , 2016, Ashes , 2014, End Credits , 2012 - ongoing, Giardini , 2009, Static , 2009, Queen and Country , 2007-2009, Gravesend , 2007, Running Thunder , 2007,...

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Pierre Huyghe's works often present themselves as complex systems characterized by a wide range of life forms, inanimate things and technologies.

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Chantal Akerman - Marian Goodman Gallery

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Chantal Akerman was a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking...and is considered to be one of the most important European directors of her generation.

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Aftershock is an immersive installation created specifically for CC by the American artist James Turrell. For more than half a century, he has worked with light and space. Influenced by his studies in perceptual psychology and his Quaker background (a pacifist Christian movement, Quakers believe in "inner light"), Turrell started experimenting with light as an art medium in the mid-1960s.

The experience of Aftershock begins outside the work, where you are asked to wait before ascending the temple-like steps and entering the so-called sensory space to witness a cycle of coloured light. Enveloping you in light and colour, the installation induces an experience of spatial boundaries failing away and loss of orientation.

James Turell - experiments with light, space and colour

Aftershock is one in a line of so called "Ganzfelds" installations, that have become iconic for Turrell's work with light, space and colour. Ganzfeld is a psychological term coined in the 1930s by the German psychologist Wolfgang Metzger, who was studying the effects of sensory overload. Exposed to an intense torrent of colour, the brain starts hallucinating as it struggles to create meaning in an endless colour field.

At age 16, Turrell obtained his pilot's license, and he has often discussed how flying has influenced his art. Flying can feel like being in a vector-less space with no definite beginning or end, as when travelling through a cloud or thick fog. Inside Aftershock you can experience a similar sense of disorientation, as you encounter an intense field of coloured light manifesting as a physical presence. The boundaries of the room appear ambiguous - you might even wonder whether your eyes are open or closed.

Turrell's work is not about light, it is light. He describes his works as containers for light, in which light and colour are experienced as physical matter. More broadly his practice is about light as both a physical and metaphorical presence that determines human perception and, in turn, our experience of the world.

Aftershock, 2021 © James Turrell, Installation view Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Photo by Florian Holzherr

First Light

CC has the special opportunity to extend the experience of James Turrell's artistic work with light by presenting the artist's most important work on paper: First Light. The series consists of twenty graphical prints of geometric, luminous shapes based on the early light installations Turrell made by projecting light onto the walls of his studio. The series of works effectively translates the experience of space and light in the artist's physical projection pieces to a two-dimensional surface.

First Light will be shown in hall 5 from March 31 st.

About James Turrell (b. 1943)

James Turrell is from Los Angeles and in addition to art, he studied perceptual psychology, mathematics, geology and astronomy. Turrell has worked with light as a material since the late 1960s and is preoccupied with the theory of perception - how humans are affected by space, light and colour.

Good to know before your visit

We are currently experiencing a lot of visitors, which creates longer queues and extra waiting time. To avoid the waiting time, we recommend visiting us during the weekdays in the early afternoons or Thursday evenings where we are open until 9 pm. NB: Aftershock closes half an hour before CC's closing time. Due to many guests, you may experience days when the queue is closed when you arrive. You can always get information about this upon arrival.

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James Turrell - Exhibition - Copenhagen Contemporary

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An immersive installation created specifically for CC by the artist James Turrell. For more than half a century, he has worked with light and space

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Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian

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In the Hirshhorn's largest interactive technology exhibition to date, three major installations from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse series came together for the artist's DC debut. A Mexican Canadian artist known for straddling the line between art, technology, and design, Lozano-Hemmer filled the Museum's entire Second Level with immersive environments that used heart-rate sensors to create kinetic and audiovisual experiences from visitors' own biometric data. Over the course of six months, Pulse animated the vital signs of hundreds of thousands of participants.

With Lozano-Hemmer's trademark sensitivities to audience engagement and architectural scale, each installation captured biometric signatures and visualized them as repetitive sequences of flashing lights, panning soundscapes, rippling waves, and animated fingerprints. These intimate "portraits," or "snapshots," of electrical activity were then added to a live archive of prior recordings to create an environment of syncopated rhythms. At a time when biometry is increasingly used for identification and control, this data constituted a new way of representing both anonymity and community.

The exhibition began with Pulse Index (2010), which was presented at its largest scale to date. The work recorded participants' fingerprints at the same time that it detected their heart rates, displaying data from the last 10,000 users on a scaled grid of massive projections. The second work, Pulse Tank (2008), which premiered at Prospect.1, New Orleans Biennial, was updated and expanded for this new exhibition. Sensors turned viewers' pulse into ripples on illuminated water tanks, creating ever-changing patterns that were reflected on the gallery walls.

Pulse Room (2006) rounded out the exhibition, featuring hundreds of clear, incandescent light bulbs hanging from the ceiling in even rows, pulsing with the heartbeats of past visitors. Visitors could add their heartbeat to the installation by touching a sensor, which transmitted the pulse to the first bulb. Additional heartbeats continued to register on the first bulb, advancing earlier recordings ahead one bulb at a time. The sound of the collected heartbeats joined the light display to amplify the physical impact of the installation.

Three short documentaries of Pulse works were also on view, showing the breadth of the series through video footage of various other biometric public-art interventions in Abu Dhabi, Toronto, Hobart, New York, and Urdaibai, Spain (2007-2015).

Curated by Stéphane Aquin, Chief Curator with curatorial assistance from Betsy Johnson, Assistant Curator.

In conjunction with the Hirshhorn exhibition, the Mexican Cultural Institute of the Embassy of Mexico in Washington, D.C. presented the Washington debut of Lozano-Hemmer's 2011 work Voice Array, on loan from the Hirshhorn's collection, a gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection in 2014. On view from Oct. 31 through Jan. 31, 2019, the interactive work recorded participants' voices and converted them into flashing lights that came together to visually and aurally depict the cumulative contributions of the last 288 visitors. This was the newest project from Hirshhorn in the City, the Museum's initiative to bring international contemporary art beyond the museum walls and into Washington's public spaces to connect artists and curators with the city's creative communities.

About the Artist

Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989, he received a Bachelor of Science in physical chemistry from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. In 2003, he founded the studio Antimodular Research in Montreal, which is composed of 14 programmers, engineers, architects, and artists from around the world. Lozano-Hemmer was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007, and he has recently had solo exhibitions at the MUAC Museum in Mexico City, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. His work is in the collection of the Hirshhorn, as well as MoMA, Guggenheim, Museo del Barrio in New York, the Tate and Science Museum in London, CIFO in Miami, Jumex and MUAC in Mexico City, SFMOMA in San Francisco, and many others. More than two dozen permanent architectural commissions are currently being developed around the world, and his large-scale interactive installations have been created for public spaces in Mexico City, New York, Vancouver, and Berlin.

Audio

Videos

Images

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and was made possible with major support from the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

Generous support for this project was provided by the Mexican Cultural Institute of the Embassy of Mexico in Washington, DC; the Embassy of Canada in Washington, DC; the Televisa Foundation; and the Québec Government Office in Washington. Additional funding was provided by the Hirshhorn International Council and the Hirshhorn Collectors' Council.

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian

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In the Hirshhorn's largest interactive technology exhibition to date, three major installations from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse series came together for the artist's DC debut. A Mexican Canadian artist known for straddling the line between art, technology, and design, Lozano-Hemmer filled the Museum's entire Second Level with immersive environments that used heart-rate sensors to create kinetic and audiovisual experiences from visitors' own biometric data.

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Guillaume Leblon: AEROSOL @ Labor, Ciudad de México: ex-chamber memo (overseas) 5

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Guillaume Leblon: AEROSOL @Labor Francisco Ramírez #5 Col. Daniel Garza Miguel Hidalgo 11830 Ciudad de México México September 7 - October 25

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Diese Webseite benötigt JavaScript.Bitte aktivieren Sie Javascript in den Einstellungen Ihres Webbrowsersund laden Sie die Website erneut.

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montage is typically defined as the arrangement of a succession of images to emit an association of ideas. Walter Benjamin thought montage was a politicized and progressive form, where a fragment “interrupts the context into which it is inserted,” producing a shock in the viewer. Montage has a distinct lack of “unity of meaning”. 

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montage is typically defined as the arrangement of a succession of images to emit an association of ideas. Walter Benjamin thought montage was a politicized and progressive form, where a fragment “interrupts the context into which it is inserted,” producing a shock in the viewer. Montage has a distinct lack of “unity of meaning”. 

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Chryssa and the Art of Montage - Wrightwood 659

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Designed by architect Tadao Ando, Wrightwood 659 is a new non-commercial exhibition space in Chicago, IL, conceived for the presentation of exhibitions devoted to architecture and socially engaged art.

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no story is "a" story or "the" story but rather a dialogic process of many historically situated particular tellings

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narrative is first and foremost a mediating form through which "meaning" must pass

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'stories are a kind of theatre where we collaborate in reinventing ourselves and authorising notions, both individual and collective, of who we are'

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In 2012, Michal Heiman saw her younger self in an 1855 photograph by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond of a woman in the Surrey County Asylum (London). In 2017, Heiman encountered her own gaze in an 1880s photograph by Oreste Bertani of Maria Dominica D'Alberto at the San Servolo Asylum (Venice).

Struck by these moments of recognition, Heiman has created a new project in which she explores various tactics for re-entry into the nineteenth century and its asylums. She has produced her own checkered dress, resembling the one worn by the women in the Surrey County Asylum, where Diamond photographed his patients. She has photographed and filmed women, as well as some men and gender non-binary individuals, to be her fellow travelers through time and space. These individuals include family members, artists, human rights activists and attorneys, migrant workers, writers, professors of law and history, asylum seekers, Knesset members, psychoanalysts, an Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, doctors, security guards, poets, and curators. She has engaged some of these subjects to perform the role of asylum guards. And she has filmed herself and her daughter, sometimes wearing masks of other female artists and activists, infiltrating the former London and Venice asylums themselves.

In this project, Heiman produces her most generous and radical work to date, resisting institutional injustice, offering sanctuary to women of the nineteenth century and today, and inviting museum visitors to do the same.

- Sarah Gordon, Curator.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated book, including essays by curator Sarah Gordon; Sharon Sliwinski, Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario; Prof. Orna Ben-Naftali, Rector of The College of Management Academic Studies (The COLLMAN) and the Emile Zola Chair for Human Rights; and artist Michal Heiman. Designed by Michael Gordon.

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In 2012, Michal Heiman saw her younger self in an 1855 photograph by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond of a woman in the Surrey County Asylum (London). In 2017, Heiman encountered her own gaze in an 1880s photograph by Oreste Bertani of Maria Dominica D'Alberto at the San Servolo Asylum (Venice).

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Christian Boltanski – Studio Visit | TateShots

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Akomfrah's skill as a film-maker and visual storyteller shines through in this compelling show

John Akomfrah, Precarity, 2017. Ballasts of Memory installation view, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2019. Photo: Rob Harris © 2019 BALTIC Courtesy of the artist, Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery.

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
6 July - 27 October 2019

by DAVID TRIGG

"Another history is always possible." These words, spoken by the late cultural theorist and political activist Stuart Hall, are heard in John Akomfrah's video installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012). They encapsulate the core concern of Ballasts of Memory , this small, compelling exhibition at the Baltic, which explores the importance of history, memory and the role of the archive in keeping people and events alive in the public consciousness. The question of who controls historical narratives is fundamental to the Ghanaian-born British artist's practice, which, since the early 1980s, has centred on issues of migration with particular reference to the experience of the African diaspora in Europe and the US.

Akomfrah came to prominence as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, whose breakthrough work, Handsworth Songs (1986), was filmed during the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London. Taking the form of an experimental film essay, it mixed contemporary interviews with newsreel footage, still photographs and a densely collaged soundtrack to explore the depressing reality experienced by immigrants to Britain from the former colonies in the Caribbean and Africa - a generation who arrived full of hope yet found alienation, hostility and dislocation. Echoes of Handsworth Songs are felt throughout this exhibition, the works in which similarly balance the poetic with the political to shed light on overlooked histories while giving voice to the marginalised and underrepresented.

Making its European debut at Baltic is Precarity (2017), a powerful three-channel installation that tells the moving story of Charles "Buddy" Bolden (1877-1931), an African-American musician who was key to the development of New Orleans jazz. His raucous cornet playing and innovative improvisation earned him the title "King Bolden", although his reign ended abruptly in 1907 when he was committed to the State Insane Asylum in Jackson, Louisiana, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was never seen in public again. In this way, Bolden can be understood as an emblematic diasporic figure: a black man whose significant influence on western culture remains largely overlooked due to ingrained prejudice. Indeed, despite being acknowledged as the father of jazz music, very little is known about the life of this musical maverick, who left behind no known recordings and only a couple of grainy photographs.

Projected on to three large screens, Precarity sits somewhere between a historical documentary, film essay, costume drama and music video. The combination of beautifully shot scenes, archival footage, enigmatic voiceover and collaged soundtrack offers a richly layered account of Bolden's legend, the inception of jazz and the American city that gave birth to them both. Actors representing Bolden, his fellow band members, wife and doctor appear throughout the film in places significant to the protagonist's story: a rural homestead, an abandoned warehouse and the mental asylum where he lived for more than two decades. His precarious place in history is acknowledged throughout the film's 46 minutes, which at times feels as much a ghost story as it does a portrait of a historical figure. Several scenes show Bolden, dressed in period costume, overlooking contemporary New Orleans, alluding to the way that the past reverberates into the present.

If Bolden has been unjustly overlooked by history, the same cannot be said of Hall (1932-2014), who is the subject of The Unfinished Conversation. This engrossing 45-minute film, also presented across three enormous screens, features Hall's own words sourced from numerous radio and television broadcasts. He is heard discussing his experiences of arriving in Britain from Jamaica as a young man in 1951; becoming a founding figure of the new left; his role in the development of cultural studies as an academic discipline; and his rise to become one of Britain's foremost public intellectuals. Hall is a significant role model for Akomfrah. Like so many immigrants, Hall came to the UK filled with optimism, but was dismayed by the realities of racism and prejudice. Nevertheless, he proved that minorities were capable of gaining agency in a culture where the odds are stacked against them.

Weaving together a diverse range of archive footage, newsreels and readings from texts by William Blake, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Mervyn Peake, Akomfrah's film explores the rich tapestry that is Hall's cultural identity, an identity, which, as the theorist himself put it, was "formed at the unstable point where the 'unspeakable' stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of a history". Indeed, Akomfrah's film is much more than a portrait of Hall, it is also an account of postwar Britain during a period of enormous upheaval. As Hall explains: "Britain was an old class society becoming a mass society; this is the period of the coming of television, the coming of youth culture ... the explosion of the 20th century in a pre-20th-century society."

The exhibition's third and least convincing inclusion is Psyche (2012), another three-channel video installation, shown this time on old-fashioned television screens. Comprising a series of appropriated film clips, the work, we are told, explores the role of the human face in cinema as a means to convey history, although what this actually means is not elaborated on. Instead, what emerges is a loose study of cinematic conventions, which in turn points to broader systems of representation. Scenes from films that have been highly influential on Akomfrah, including Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Kenneth Macpherson's Borderline (1930),Peter Watkin's Culloden (1964), Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and his unfinished Que viva México! (1932), are spliced together to form an unsettling and ultimately perplexing montage of anguished and grieving faces. Clocking in at eight minutes, it is the shortest and most intimate work here, but also the least refined and, as such, the least accessible.

With just three works, Ballasts of Memory is a modest show. Yet, with a running time of around 100 minutes, there is little sense of being short-changed. Indeed, in addition to being splendidly installed, the limited selection encourages sustained viewing and it is testament to Akomfrah's skill as a film-maker and visual storyteller that the lengthiest pieces, despite their non-linear, multilayered style, are able to captivate and engage so completely. Akomfrah's consistency in shining a light on the precarious history of diasporic peoples does much to counterbalance the sea of amnesia in which he says our culture is so prone to swim. Certainly, his powerful melding of history with subjective experience, the archival and the contemporary moment ensures that his works, along with the issues they address, are not easily forgotten.

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John Akomfrah, Precarity, 2017. Ballasts of Memory installation view, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2019. Photo: Rob Harris © 2019 BALTIC Courtesy of the artist, Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 6 July - 27 October 2019 by DAVID TRIGG "Another history is always possible."

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'Reconstructive Memory' is an English term borrowed from cognitive psychology meaning that memory is not a faithful reproduction of past events but rather a mental faculty based on recollection-reconstruction processes. Depending on our emotions, our level of tiredness, our beliefs, we may reconstruct episodes from our lives in a way that leads to distortions, alterations and false memories.

Since the invention of computers, the data-storage race has been generating technological debates.The machines are obliged to keep offering more memory to enable us to preserve our own.Like a search engine, our brain uses this external memory more and more, and invents strategies to free itself from the overload of amassed information. It therefore knows where to find the details it needs, without needing to store the contents: a new way to operate our encephalon, approaching a form of artificial intelligence.

It has now become a habit on the internet: documentation precedes exhibition visits.Those immaculate images purged of all imperfections circulate quickly, often substituting for the works, which must be photogenic above all. In 'Reconstructive Memory', we further accentuate the difference between the physical encounter with the pieces and their discovery through documentation. Infact, although we are able to get close to the works in the gallery, the experience behind the screen is disrupted by large printed transparent filters placed in the axis of the pieces hung on the gallery walls, allowing only a partial view of these.

Whether it be the paintings that Gina Beavers has carefully modelled and painted based on photographs gleaned on Googleimages; poetic collages by HayleyTompkins made up of re-photographed advertisements arranged on galvanized metal panels; thermally moulded intestinal paintings by Nicolas Deshayes; sculpted paint by Michael Assiff; varnished, melancholic paintings by Philipp Timischl; or the woven digital image by Travess Smalley, the works presented in the space are hard to understand by means of at wo-dimensional image. Beyond their meaning, they were chosen for their complex materiality and appear muddled, as if they had poorly digested their transfer to the screen. Fleshy, corporeal, reflecting our own anatomy, they make Reconstructive Memory an exhibition you want to roam, explore, even touch.

The large-format prints placed in the visitor's field of vision were made from Galerie Valentin's photographic archives.During the consultation period, our own memories of visits to rue Saint-Gilles resurfaced. We were gripped by the specificities of the place and the hanging automatisms that led successive photographs to produce five recurring viewing angles. Collages created by super imposing and deforming dozens of exhibition views are seen as memory interfaces, mnesic traces of the past thirteen years. Taking as their very subject the place in which they have been setup, these porous screens oscillate between scenographic elements and contextual sculptures. These ambiguous filters, conceived as pieces that condition access to the works and unsettle visitors, act as revelatory reproductions offering a new perspective on the work of the invited artists.

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'Reconstructive Memory' is an English term borrowed from cognitive psychology meaning that memory is not a faithful reproduction of past events but rather a mental faculty based on recollection-reconstruction processes. Depending on our emotions, our level of tiredness, our beliefs, we may reconstruct episodes from our lives in a way that leads to distortions, alterations and false memories.

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Part 2 of the research: Consequences of 'living' and 'fluid' archives

The archive's traditional representational relationship to social identity, agency and memory is challenged by the distributed nature of networked media. Initially designed as a mirror of physical collections and paper archives, the digital repository became a collection itself. A new set of values is presented, but it often remains unarticulated at the cultural and scientific level. For this particular commission we wanted to seek new understandings of the relationship between the software with which online archives are coded and the social, commercial and organisational practices of what is still considered the archiving of documents. In particular we wanted to look at the role of users, in all its manifestations as the meeting point of cultural value and technological systems.

As sociologist Mike Featherstone puts it, 'Increasingly the boundaries between the archive and everyday life become blurred through digital recording and storage technologies' (2006, 591). Whereas the paper archive has always been the place to store and preserve documents and records, and has functioned as a warehouse for the material from which memories were (re)constructed, its digital counterpart is changing the meaning and function of an archive. Rather than aiming to compare and analyse the differences, in this phase of the project we will focus on what some have defined as 'living archives' (Passerini 2014; Lehner 2014, 77) or 'fluid archives' (Aasman 2014) and the changing role of their users in those spaces. Numerous other terms are used to describe these 'new' types of archives, however it is commonly acknowledged that archives are no longer stable institutions.

The terms 'living' and 'fluid' point to the following characteristic of online archives: openness (they are constantly changing and accumulating), self-reference (hash tags have replaced traditional categorisation) and they represent - like many other online platforms - the shift from passive audiences to active users. Due to their transient quality, it could be argued, these archives are not designed for long-term storage and memory, but for reproduction. As media scientist Wolfgang Ernst explains, the emphasis in the digital archive shifts from documenting a single event to redevelopment, in which a document is (co-) produced by users (Ernst 2012, 95). Whereas the source may remain intact, as in the original archive, its existence is constantly changing and dynamic.

One of the main reasons for this change is the practice of a variety of non-specialists who are 'archiving the everyday' and creating endless 'personal archives'. This has often given rise to statements about the 'democratisation of archival practices', which allows a broad range of individuals, communities and organisations to document, preserve, share and promote (community) identity through collective stories and heritage (Cook 2013; Gilliland and Flinn 2013).

What does it mean when archives are thought of in terms of (re)production or creation systems instead of representation or memory systems? Whereas this question has many consequences for thinking about the archive, for the purpose of this phase in the research we focus on how these changes affect the agency of users, by addressing the ways in which users engage with online archives and playfully interrogate and subvert systems such as archives to produce new knowledge concerning their social, cultural and commercial values.

Bibliography

Aasman, Susanna. 2014. 'Saving Private Reels? Archiving User Generated Content (Formerly Known as Home Movies) in the Digital Age'. In Amateur Filmmaking the Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, edited by L. Rascaroli, G. Young, and B. Monahan. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 245-57.

Cook, Terry. 2013. 'Evidence, Memory, Identity and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms'. Archival Science, June, Vol. 13, No. 2-3, pp. 95-120.

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2012. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Featherstone, Mark. 2006. 'Archive'. Theory, Culture & Society, May, Vol. 23, No. 2-3, pp. 591-6.

Gilliland, Anne and Andrew Flinn. 2013 'Community Archives: What are we really talking about?'. Nexus, Confluence, and Difference: Community Archives meets Community Informatics: Prato CIRN Conference Oct 28-30 2013, editors: L. Stillman, A. Sabiescu, N. Memarovic, Centre for Community Networking Research, Centre for Social Informatics, Monash University.

Lehner, Sharon. 2014. 'Documentation Strategy and the Living Archive'. In Inheriting Dance: An Invitation from Pina, edited by Marc Wagenbach and The Pina Bausch Foundation. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, pp. 75-84.

Passerini, Luisa. 2014. 'Living Archives. Continuity and Innovation in the Art of Memory'. Unpublished transcript of lecture at Columbia University, 1 April.
Read the interview with Template

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The archive's traditional representational relationship to social identity, agency and memory is challenged by the distributed nature of networked media. Initially designed as a mirror of physical collections and paper archives, the digital repository became a collection itself. A new set of values is presented, but it often remains unarticulated at the cultural and scientific level.

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Our memories aren’t always reliable. Our brains often manipulate, invent, and distort memories to fit their own agenda.

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William Kentridge: Pain & Sympathy | Art21 "Extended Play"