calendario eventi  :: 

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7/7/2007

Two exhibitions

Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker
July 8 – September 23, 2007

An exhibition of photographs by world-renowned Iranian filmmaker, photographer, and poet Abbas Kiarostami.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is proud to present Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker, an exhibition of photographs by one of the world's most critically acclaimed film directors. The exhibition features four series of photographs, including two series never previously exhibited on the West Coast. The exhibition accompanies a major series of Kiarostami's films at the Pacific Film Archive, beginning July 7 and continuing through August 30. Together, the exhibition and film series provide an unusually rich and comprehensive presentation of Kiarostami's work. Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker will be on view at the Berkeley Art Museum from July 8 through September 23, 2007.

"One single picture could be the mother of cinema," Kiarostami has said. "That's where cinema starts, with one single picture." A sense of minimalism permeates all of Kiarostami's work, including his photographs and films as well as his writing (Kiarostami is a published poet, as well as a painter and illustrator). Concurrent with his international acclaim as a filmmaker, Kiarostami has pursued a passion for photography since the 1980s, at the time of the Iranian revolution. He regards photography as a more pure medium than film, since it is relieved of the burden of narrative or entertainment, and in each photograph he sets out to distill the image to its barest essence.

Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker features works from four different series: Rain (2006) and Trees and Crows (2006), both of which were shown for the first time at P.S.1 in New York in spring 2006; Roads and Trees and Snow White (both 1978 – 2003).

The seven color prints in the series Rain were taken by the artist through the windshield of his car, with everything but the raindrops on his windshield in focus. Kiarostami has described his car as his "best friend," for its function as his office, a comfortable space, and a location for contemplation. In his films, the protagonist is often behind the wheel of a car or filmed from above while driving on windy roads on the outskirts of town.

The photographs in Trees and Crows, also in color, feature serene, linear compositions of trees in various settings interrupted by the appearance of a bird or birds. Trees are a persistent theme in all of Kiarostami's work, be they stately and majestic or precarious survivors in an inhospitable environment. For the artist they symbolize endurance and adaptability. Both of these photographic series are being seen for the first time on the West Coast.

The nineteen black-and-white photographs in the series Roads and Trees and Snow White are mostly landscape shots for which the artist has already received widespread acclaim. In Roads and Trees, roads traverse barren, mostly unpeopled landscapes. Snow White explores the single motif of trees silhouetted starkly against blank white snow in images that are both stark and sublime.

Also included in the exhibition is the video installation Summer Afternoon (2006), an interior scene that depicts shadows dancing against a curtained window. The breeze from a fan positioned behind the viewer adds another experiential dimension, as if the viewer is actually standing at the window itself.


PFA Film Series

Kiarostami, like Fellini, Godard or Kurosawa, is a director whose films have given new direction to world cinema. Beginning July 7 and running through August 30, Pacific Film Archive will present a retrospective of Kiarostami's films, featuring sixteen features and a wide selection of short films spanning his remarkable and influential career.

Kiarostami honed his craft as a documentary filmmaker concerned with the lives of children in Iran, and later gained a following in the West with a series of remarkable films that were at once documentary and fiction, "real" and created (And Life Goes On, Close-Up, Through The Olive Trees, and Where Is The Friend's Home?). Kiarostami solidified his standing by winning the 1997 Cannes Palme d'Or for Taste of Cherry, and with The Wind Will Carry Us, which was awarded the Grand Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1999. Starting with the barest of scripts, and improvising specifics with his nonprofessional casts, Kiarostami crafts fictions that are barely removed from real life, works of deceptive simplicity and indefinable poetry that philosophize on how we film reality, view reality, and most of all, how we understand reality.

To learn more about the film series at the Pacific Film Archive, please contact Shelley Diekman, PFA Publicist, at shelleyd@berkeley.edu, or (510) 642-0365.

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David Goldblatt: Intersections
July 8, 2007 - August 26, 2007

Images of post-apartheid South Africa by one of world's most important contemporary documentary photographers.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents David Goldblatt: Intersections, an exhibition of color photographs of daily life in post-apartheid South Africa by one of the world's leading documentary photographers. David Goldblatt's images of his native country have gained worldwide recognition for their intimate, unflinching views of a culture ravaged by prejudice and injustice. David Goldblatt: Intersections features two recent series of work, Johannesburg Intersections and Platteland Intersections, which show the changing face of contemporary South Africa. The exhibition opens at the museum on July 8 and runs through August 26, 2007. Goldblatt will take part in a conversation in the museum galleries with Okwui Enwezor, dean of academic affairs and senior vice-president at the San Francisco Art Institute on Sunday, July 8, at 3 p.m.

Goldblatt, who was born in Randfontein, South Africa, in 1930, first started photographing his native country in 1948, the same year the National Party came to power and instituted the policy of apartheid. Since that time, Goldblatt has photographed the South African people, landscape, and cities, creating arresting images that follow in the tradition of the great documentary photography of the twentieth century.

The photographs featured in Johannesburg Intersections reveal the contrasts that make up South Africa today: white and black, rural and urban, desperate and hopeful. Goldblatt captures many of the significant social changes that have occurred in the past decade, including the large numbers of black low-wage workers who now live in the cities, and the white residents and businesses that have relocated from the cities to newly built suburbs and office parks. He also depicts the crude cemeteries that are evidence of the impact of HIV and AIDS in the townships, and political change in the form of the elected officials who lead municipalities created following government reforms. In Platteland Intersections, Goldblatt shows the vastness of the landscape, the damage done to the land by the mining industry, and the dignity of the people living on the land.

Goldblatt photographed exclusively in black and white until well into the 1990s. Following the dismantling of apartheid and South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, he began to look for new expressive possibilities for his work, and eventually turned to color photography and digital photography. This important transition only came about after new developments in scanning and printing technology that allowed Goldblatt to achieve the same sense of depth in his color work that he had in his black and white photography. His more recent work, including the series featured in David Goldblatt: Intersections, uses large-format photography combined with advanced ink-jet papers to produce images that are redolent of the colors and light of the South African landscape.

Goldblatt's photographs of life in South Africa have been published in a large number of magazines and books. His major publication, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, was released in 1998 to critical acclaim, and that same year a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It wasn't until 2002 that Goldblatt gained international recognition with an exhibition of two groups of photographs at the contemporary art exhibition Documenta 11. Today his work is in major collections around the world, including the French National Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Goldblatt has authored many books, including two with the novelist Nadine Gordimer.

Public Program

Conversation with the Artist
David Goldblatt and Okwui Enwezor
Sunday, July 8, 3:30 p.m., Gallery 2

Joining David Goldblatt for a conversation about his work will be Okwui Enwezor, a recognized expert in international contemporary art and a longtime friend of the artist. The two will draw on their personal experiences of Africa as well as their mutual expertise in art and photography, to examine Goldblatt's photographs in terms of both their visual and social content.

Okwui Enwezor is dean of academic affairs and senior vice-president at the San Francisco Art Institute. He was artistic director of the 2006 Seville Biennial (BIACS2) in Spain; Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany; and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial. He has curated numerous exhibitions around the world, including Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography and David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, David Goldblatt: Intersections ($60, hardcover), the first complete volume to date of Goldblatt's color photography. Contact the Museum Store at (510) 642-1475, or visit the store online

On view

Parting the Curtain: Asian Art Revealed
Through August 31, 2008
A showcase for the museum's extraordinary holdings of Asian art, including ancient pottery, classical Chinese paintings, religious art from Tibet, and provocative works by contemporary artists.
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Andrea Zittel: A–Z Travel Trailer Unit
Through October 14, 2007
(Temporarily removed from view.) Andrea Zittel creates personalized designs for living, useful artworks that make no distinction between the conceptual and the utilitarian. Her faintly retro travel habitat brings a touch of the trailer park to the museum's sculpture garden this summer.

Allison Smith: Notion Nanny
MATRIX 222
Through August 12, 2007
Allison Smith has some interesting notions about the meanings of history and craft in contemporary life. In her latest project, inspired by nineteenth-century peddler dolls called "notion nannies," she casts herself as an itinerant apprentice, working with other craftspeople to exchange ideas, skills, objects, and experiences along the way.

psyche: R&R
Through October 14, 2007
BAM/PFA honors the centennial of the California College of the Arts with this exhibition of lyrical watercolors by Laurie Reid and funny, architecture-inflected drawings by Mark A. Rodriguez, both M.F.A. graduates of CCA.

Kunstkammer
Through October 14, 2007
An eccentric array of prints, drawings, and photographs from the BAM collections fills the Theater Gallery, with works by Dürer, Whistler, Gauguin, Basquiat, and many others hung together in the style of a sixteenth-century Kunstkammer—an "art chamber" offering objects of scholarship and wonder.

Selections from the Collection
Through December 31, 2008
This ongoing, evolving exhibition in the museum's central atrium gallery features a range of BAM's signature works, from Rubens to Rothko, as well as important new acquisitions.

Press contact: Rod Macneil rmacneil@berkeley.edu
Chris Fox chrisfox@berkeley.edu

Image: Abbas Kiarostami, from the series Rain, 2006; C-print; 28 1/2 x 41 1/4 in.; collection of the Iranian Art Foundation, New York.

Berkeley Art Museum
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2626 Bancroft Way Berkeley, CA 94720
Wednesday and Friday to Sunday, 11 to 5; Thursday 11 to 7.
Closed Monday and Tuesday

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