Alejandro Cesarco "Two Films"
Murray Guy
This event has ended.
The two films by Alejandro Cesarco continue Cesarco’s investigation of the narrative and affective possibilities of conceptual art; both films are re-enactments or translations which push the resonant limits of narrative, enacting processes of remembering and forgetting.
Everness (2008) is a looping film installation made up of five chapters: a remake of the very last scene of James Joyce's The Dead, a monologue on the meaning of tragedy, a breakfast scene, and two songs: a Tropicalista melody penned by Caetono Veloso during his exile from Brazil, and a republican chant from the Spanish civil war. The work describes ideas typically associated with youth—a first love, the loss of innocence, a sense of sincerity and political commitment. It unfolds in an uncertainly tense domestic space that seems at once both interior and exterior, between a naïve present and an evocative past.
Zeide Isaac (2009) is a work of fiction rooted in reality, produced collaboratively by Cesarco and his grandfather Isaac, who is 94 years old and a survivor of the Holocaust. Whereas standard testimonies of survival presuppose an overriding fidelity to events, here Cesarco has written a script that his grandfather performs, as both actor and witness. As one of the last of his generation, he embodies the transfer of these narratives from first to third person. His performance is a reflection on the act of memory, and the limitations and possibilities of testimony as meaningful form.
A new book on the film Everness will be available from the gallery. Published on the occasion of this exhibition, it includes texts on the work by Julie Ault and Maria Gainza. Everness was produced with support from the Rolex Mentor-Protégé Arts Initiative, and Zeide Isaac was produced with the help of a generous grant from Art Matters.
Alejandro Cesarco was born in 1975 in Montivideo, Uruguay, and currently lives and works in New York.
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2009 to October 24, 2009