calendario eventi  :: 

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1/7/2003

Three openings

Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris - MAM, Paris

Jonas Mekas
A Camera for Jonas

After the exhibition Voilà in 2000, a retrospective of Jonas Mekas archives, the museum proposes, from 2nd July to 28th September 2003, new projects of the artist.

Born in Lithuania, living in New York since 1949, Jonas Mekas made his name filming his neighborhood in Brooklyn, the meeting place of European expatriates. Increasing the shots, he elaborates, a new cinema/film genre: «the diary-film», based on the absence of production, without adaptation of the subject, of time, of place.

«Expatriate-traveler» as he defines himself, his life joins the activities of the underground American cinema, besides Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Stanley Brakhage and Len Lye. Film-maker but also planner and film critic, he founds in 1970 the «Anthology Film Archives», a film theater which gathers classic or avant-garde movies, among which a lot of ignored masterpieces of independent cinema. His committed position denounces in different publications - Film Culture, The Village Voice - the Hollywood movies and stands up for all alternatives forms of cinema.

For the exhibition, Jonas Mekas presents three new works:
Travels, five movies 16mm transferred in DVD, realized in Avila, in Assisi, in Italia, in Moscow and in Stockholm.
?To Petrarca who walked over the hills of Provence?constitutes «a sound diary» of 51 snatches, recorded on different occasions. It echoes to the ?diary-film?.
Dedication to Fernand Léger, tributes to a Fernand Léger project of 1933. From personal archives the artist realized a 24 hours movie about the life of an ordinary couple.

In the annex of the permanent collections (ground floor of the museum) is presented My Night Life. This work, in 20 panels, is the diary of the dreams he re-transcribed from July 1978 to July 1979 and for what he entrusts the illustrations to Auguste Varkalis (painter, musician and film-maker, born in Lituania).

An artist book accompanies the exhibition gathering postcards, notes, drawings and letters addressed to Jonas Mekas during his life. For more information please go to: http://www.onestarpress.com

Curators : Hans Ulrich Obrist & Angeline Scherf

Yoko Ono
?WOMEN?S ROOM?

?WOMEN?S ROOM? presents four films that bear witness to the artist?s feminist convictions: Freedom, Fly, Rape; and Cut Piece (a film of Yoko Ono?s performance Cut Piece in 1964).

Using an experimental approach, linked to the Fluxus movement in which she participated from the moment of its inception; Yoko Ono often takes inspiration from the everyday. With the sound work, Cough Piece, composed out of the repetitive rhythm of coughing, and Sky TV, which shows an image of the sky taken by a camera placed on a roof, the artist has created a poetic body of work based in humorous irony.

?WOMEN?S ROOM? simultaneously makes reference to collective engagement and personal memory. Vertical Memory consists in a series of identical portraits associated with very short texts dealing with intimate, fictive, and real experiences. In each case, this confrontation seems to ?displace? the meaning of the photographic image.

The artist?s clarity and her economy of means are at the service of a perpetually changing art. Advancing to the Duchampian principle according to which the creative act can only be completed by the spectator, she provides them with an active physical and metal role in her work. Yoko Ono solicits the imagination with Blue Room Event, which is made up of 14 hand-written sentences on the walls, ceiling, and floor, and the meaning of which is in total contradiction with what the spectator sees.

Today, Yoko Ono?s work finds an echo in that of a new generation of artists who, like Pipilotti Rist and Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, consider her to be an influence.

An artist?s book, entitled ?SPARE ROOM?, has been published on the occasion of this exhibition.

Curators : Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Garimorth

déplacements

This exhibition, the title of which makes reference to a book by Claudio Magris brings together recent and entirely new projects by artists and architects; it is organized around notions of displacement.

The incessant circulation of people, resources, information, and in particular, images, has a profound influence on our experience and modifies our perception of space and time. In order to decipher the unpredictable and complex consequences, a number of artists have chosen to use a trans-disciplinary approach in their work (including anthropology, sociology, demographics, and urbanism). Through the use of diverse media-video, multi-media installation, photography, sound work -they offer up a critical perspective that incites visitors to ?displace? themselves.

In the order as they appear in the exhibition:

The collective Multiplicity privileges documentary and analytical research in their approach to the borders of Israel and Palestine, with an additional project of Luca Vitone.
Deimantas Narkevi?ius? work stems from personal experience and confronts individual identity and territorial memory.
Dorit Margreiter focuses on private and public space and the ways in which the media industry is taking over everyday life.
Relying on a fictional mode and the ephemeral, Bojan Sar?evi? has grafted a trompe l?oeil image into the ARC space, and Nicolas Moulin has created an irreversible count-down that simulates the emptying of the earth?s population.
Lastly, Une agora réunionnaise-a documentary video installation by Jean-Christophe Royoux and Caecilia Tripp, which is associated with works by Thierry Fontaine, Jack Beng-Thi and Alain Louis Padeau makes evident the processes of hybridization and the cultural and artistic creation of the island Reunion, itself a key site of displacements.

These different projects, as well as an intervention by Francis Alÿs that will take place during the exhibition period, constitute a prologue to ARC?s own displacement to a new space, The Couvent des Cordeliers, in November 2003.

Curated by: Laurence Bossé and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Vivian Rehberg and Anne Dressen

Image: Yoko Ono

Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
11, avenue du Président Wilson
(F) 75116 Paris
Tél : 01 53 67 40 00
Fax :01 47 23 35 98

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