“Last Year at Marienbad redux” Exhibition
EFA Project Space
This event has ended.
Curated by: James Voorhies, produced by Bureau for Open Culture
“Last Year at Marienbad redux” is an exhibition, public program and publication that together explore the way fictional narratives develop to form established knowledge and understanding of people, places, events and things. Using the recurring question “Didn’t we meet at Marienbad last year?” from the 1961 film directed by French filmmaker Alain Resnais as a point of departure, “Last Year at Marienbad redux” will feature works of art that deploy cinematic conventions¾editing, character development, plot, mise-en-scène and montage in ways that disrupt and conflate what is fact and fiction, exploring how memory, meaning and ultimately an understanding of reality are shaped.
The exhibition will bring together work by nine international contemporary artists whose practices engage with the technical and conceptual qualities of cinema. It will present newly commissioned and existing work, including “Reagan Tape” (1981) by Los Angeles-based artist Allan Sekula, a 10-minute video that intercuts clips from Reagan’s first State of the Union Address with clips from various Hollywood movies he starred in prior to becoming President. Sekula juxtaposes words of an emergent “Reaganomics” philosophy with scenes of a future President trying to tame a chimpanzee in “Bedtime for Bonzo” (1951). A selection of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” from the early 1970s will be exhibited. “Fake Estates” includes photographic and text documentation of the artist’s purchase of peculiarly small and oddly shaped parcels of land in New York City, mostly Queens. Brooklyn-based artist Josh Tonsfeldt will make a new installation based on the personal effects of a New York socialite and author who passed away in the 1970s and whose obscure legacy is marked by a self-published memoir and a found box of objects, including a suicide note. Berlin-based artist Maya Schweizer will exhibit “A Memorial, a Synagogue, a Bridge and a Church” (2012), a high-contrast black-and-white video that explores transformations in the urban fabric of Bratislava’s Fish Square when construction of a new bridge over the Danube sparked outrage from local residents in response to the demolition of the old Jewish quarter and synagogue.
The Marienbad Sessions will be a program of public events occurring inside a specifically designed and designated area of the exhibition. The program will include a series of talks, screenings and performances led by some of the participating artists and writers. This public forum will include a listening session hosted by Dan Fox, a performance reading of a script written by Jessamyn Fiore and a lecture by Jens Hoffmann on the history of 1960s avant-garde cinema. It will include a screening of recent films by Maya Schweizer and conversation between the artist and curator James Voorhies. The Marienbad Sessions seeks overall to transform the exhibition site into a learning site where real-time engagement with the public intersects visually and conceptually among works of art on display, uniting art and education into a singular cohesive space of exhibition.
The Marienbad Paperswill be a hybrid book uniting characteristics of an art journal, catalogue essay, film script and art criticism into one printed form, and feature a series of newly commissioned texts by Jennifer Allen, Jessamyn Fiore, Dan Fox, Jens Hoffmann and James Voorhies. The Marienbad Papers will be available at the closing event and publication release on October 26, 2013. The publication is made possible with a grant from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.
[Image: Allan Sekula “Still from ‘Reagan Tape’” (1981) single-channel video, color, sound, 10 min. 39 sec., edition of 5; © Allan Sekula, Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica]
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2013 to October 26, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00