Kerry Tribe
Omer Fast
Andrea Geyer
Liam Gillick
Anton Vidokle
Yael Bartana
Mercedes Vicente
Scripted Realities tests. The project presents video artworks that challenge representations of reality, using scripts and transcripts from real life. Works by international artists examine these 'true stories' to expose and expand forms of the documentary.
curator Mercedes Vicente
The new exhibition True Stories: Scripted Realities tests, exposes and expands forms of the documentary with video works that challenge representations of reality. The works use a variety of scripts and transcripts from real life or ‘true stories’.
Omer Fast’s The Casting 2007 features an interview with a US solider, and is filmed, edited and restaged by actors as a way to expose the construction of news by the media.
Kerry Tribe’s latest work There Will Be ________ 2012 retraces the mystery behind the 1929 infamous crime at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Using snippets of dialogues culled from feature films shot at the mansion, Tribe’s new script builds a plot that offers radically diverging accounts of the double killing that occurred in the mansion.
Tribe explains, “Taking as a starting point a series of serendipitous relationships between cinematic and actual history, it is ultimately the gaps in those relationships – the distance between cinematic representation and historical account – that will become the subject of this project”.
Andrea Geyer’s Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb restages the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem through edited transcripts of the trial, the writings of Hannah Arendt and a single performer that plays the six main roles of reporter, accused, prosecutor, defence, audience and judge.
An existent curatorial text by a prominent curator is staged in a television soap opera style by a group of noted artists, curators and critics in A Guiding Light 2010. The new collaborative work of Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle reveals the performative role and dialogic critical processes common in contemporary curatorial practice.
In Yael Bartana's trilogy ...and Europe will be Stunned 2007-2011, a manifesto written and acted by a well known activist in Poland constructs a fictional political utopia. This work explores complex relations between Jewish, Polish and other European people in the age of globilisation.
True Stories: Scripted Realities curator Mercedes Vicente says documentary traditions in contemporary art have recently been reinvented and reinvigorated by merging with other forms such as video art, performance and conceptual art.
“These represent an attempt to search for new forms and methods of representing and constructing reality while still engaging with social and political contents, and looking at the gallery as a location for political action and activism,” Vicente says.
Saturday 10 March 2.00pm
Director Rhana Devenport in conversation with art historian, documentary filmmaker and photography curator Luit Bieringa and artist Laurence Aberhart
Sunday 11 March 11.30am
Join Contemporary Art Curator Mercedes Vicente for a discussion on the new exhibition True Stories: Scripted Realities
Press contact:
Kelly Loney tel +64 6 7596717 kellyl@govettbrewster.com
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Cnr Queen and King Sts New Plymouth 4342 Aotearoa New Zealand
daily 10.00am - 5.00pm
Entry Free