NYAB Event - Chris Marker "Quelle heure est-elle?"

Chris Marker "Quelle heure est-elle?"

Peter Blum Gallery

This event has ended.

Chris Marker: “Quelle heure est-elle?” comprises three different photographic series (Koreans, Crush-Art, QUELLE HEURE EST-ELLE?) as well as a grouping of photogravures, film posters, postcards and two video installations. The works range from 1957 to the present. Koreans is a grouping of 51 images that Chris Marker shot in 1957 when he was one of the few journalists who had the opportunity to travel and explore North Korea freely. The resulting photographs give an uncensored record of the daily life in North Korea four years after the end of the devastating war. In the recent series Crush-Art, Marker crumbles pages of magazines that depict women’s portraits and scans the crushed faces, creating ghost-like figures that challenge our understanding of time and beauty. In QUELLE HEURE EST-ELLE?, another current project, Marker captures women in the Paris subway with a hidden camera, partly with a wristwatch camera. These photographs of women are innocent and stolen moments.

The installation THE HOLLOW MEN, (2005) takes its starting point and its title from T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem "The Hollow Men," which reflected on the European wasteland that resulted from the First World War. This work was first shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Both these installations question the linearity of narration and history.

Important parallel events: The Harvard Film Archive (http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/) will host a virtual event with Chris Marker titled THE SECOND LIFE OF CHRIS MARKER on May 16th, 2009 and Icarus Films Home Video (http://HomeVideo.IcarusFilms.com/ ) will release A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge),the epic historical documentary on the worldwide political struggles of the Sixties and Seventies on May 5th, 2009.

[Image: Chris Marker "Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men" (2005) CD-ROM installation 19 minute loop with sound. Edition of 6]