“Projects 102: Neïl Beloufa” Exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art
This event has ended.
The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Lobby Gallery, fourth floor
The Museum of Modern Art presents the work of Neïl Beloufa, an emerging artist who deftly combines sculpture and moving-image media to create immersive viewing spaces. Projects 102, part of The Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series, features The Colonies (2016), a custom-built architectonic installation Beloufa made by hand with a small crew using inexpensive construction materials and techniques. Within this environment, the artist treats projections like objects and deliberately obstructs and diffuses images onto multiple surfaces. By revealing the cables and cords in his works and looping in images of viewers through closed-circuit television, the artist draws attention to the technological or social apparatuses and power dynamics embedded within the installation. Projects 102: Neïl Beloufa is organized by Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, MoMA.
The video at the center of the presentation, People’s passion, lifestyle, beautiful wine, gigantic glass towers, all surrounded by water (2011), features a group of people in an unnamed city enthusiastically describing their fantasy of bourgeois urban culture. Beloufa often works collaboratively, and in this instance he teamed up with actors to generate scripts that imitate such popular genres as infomercials and science fiction. He has repurposed this video in different custom-built environments, installing it at MoMA with a view of Midtown Manhattan’s skyline. In the space between the fantasy he represents on screen and the real world of galleries and surveillance systems in which he places his works, Beloufa insists that his “work isn’t the actual object but the relations I have built with it.”
Beloufa is a French-Algerian artist who received his Visual Arts National Diploma at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2007), and studied at Cooper Union, New York, and CalArts, Valencia. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Schinkel Pavilion (2015), the Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum (2015), La Casa Encendida (2015), Banff Centre (2014), ICA London (2014), UCLA Hammer Museum (2013), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012). He has also been included in major group exhibitions such as the Paris Triennale (2012), the 55th Venice Biennial (2013), the Lyon Biennale (2013), Fruits de La Passion (2013), Here and Elsewhere (2014) and the Taipei Biennial (2014). Locally, his work has been shown at Anthology Film Archives, Sculpture Center, and Whitebox Art Center, among other venues.
Media
Schedule
from March 12, 2016 to June 12, 2016