Mark Lewis
dal 15/11/2005 al 10/2/2006
Segnalato da
15/11/2005
Mark Lewis
MNAC - The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest
Landscapes
Landscapes
Guest curator: Enrico Lunghi, Director Casino Luxemburg
Curator: Ruxandra Balaci
Coordinator: Suzana Dan
"Film is an old invention," says Mark Lewis. "It's a bit dusty, and
artists are picking over its remains, re-thinking its history." Fascinated by
cinema, its social phenomenon, and its power to seduce, Mark Lewis began to
experiment with film in the mid-1990s. The artist premises much of his work on the
idea that cinema is entering its terminal phase as the medium of choice for mass
artistic expression. Mark Lewis' productions have closer ties to the world of
independent cinema than to the low-tech video art projects of the recent past.
Landscapes is a selection of ten most recent video works of the artist (2001-2005),
and will be hosted in MNAC for three months.
“I like the slowness with which Mark Lewis takes me through the landscapes he has
chosen and I revel in the unlikely scenes he has built up. The former gradually
gives physical density to my gaze, while the latter calls for reflection and awakens
the visual memory, this library of images that we carry around in our heads and
whose stacks fill up more or less intentionally. The means Mark Lewis brings into
play for this double game between the body and the intellect are deceptively
straightforward: a direct take, a camera that is still nearly all the time and an
action that fits in naturally with the scenery.†Enrico Lunghi, guest curator
“Mark Lewis’ work is about time and space. It is about the inexorable flow of time;
about alienated atmospheres, impersonal architectures and wasted landscapes
conveying psychologically latent feelings: of life and death, of micro and macro, of
order and chaos, of entropy and anti-entropy, of the interplay between the simple
and the inordinately complex. It is about atomized singularities in Brownian
trajectories… about contemporary solitude...†Ruxandra Balaci, curator
Recognized both in North America and in Europe, Mark Lewis’ films have been featured
in many solo exhibitions and have been presented in group exhibitions that have
conceptualized the growing interest of contemporary artists in the temporal and
narrative properties of film: Re-makes at CAPC Musee d’art contemporain de
Bordeaux, and (Based upon) True Stories, at Witte de With in Rotterdam, en 2003;
Liverpool Biennal at the Tate Liverpool, in 2002; Mois de la Photo e
Montreal, in 2001; Intelligence: New British Art 2000 at the Tate Britain in
London, in 2000; Cinema! Cinema! The Cinematic Experience at the Stedelijk Van
Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, in 1999; and L’effet cinema, at the Musee
d’art contemporain de Montreal, in 1997.
Cosmin Tapu Communication IR Dept. / tel. + 40 721831385
MNAC, The National Museum of Contemporary Art
2-4, Str. Izvor, aripa E4, Bucharest (RO), 050563