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10/9/2009

Grand Paris Texas

Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

We are pleased to present the work "Grand Paris Texas" by the artist duo Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler in their forth solo exhibition at the gallery.

In their elaborately produced video works — both filmically and architecturally — Hubbard and Birchler bring into play the shifts between the conscious and the subconscious, presence and absence, inwardness and outwardness. They fathom conflicts involving desire and repression, gender positions, remembering and forgetting. The house, or the dwelling, as an unstable space between home and haunting, frequently comes to the fore in their work as well.

Through their open narratives, which interweave agency and its spaces in a complex manner, Hubbard and Birchler unhinge the spatiotemporal order. Involved scenes include both real locations and mise-en-scènes appropriated by the artists based on personal experiences, historical research, and literary or filmic sources.
The protagonist of "Grand Paris Texas" is "The Grand", a long-abandoned cinema in Paris, Texas — the same small town made famous by Wim Wenders through his 1984 film of the same name, without the actual town even having made an appearance. "Grand Paris Texas" interweaves various narratives and metanarratives: about an obsolete site of filmic illusions, about a small town and its entanglements with Wim Wenders’s film as well as with the French capital, and about the techniques and production methods of filmmaking itself. In "Grand Paris Texas", Hubbard and Birchler for the first time take up formats of the documentary so as to equally approach both real and imaginary spaces and situations.
At the dilapidated cinema, cluttered with debris and dated technology, we observe a film team armed with dust masks and gloves, their activities reminiscent of those pursued by speleologists. At one point, Hubbard and Birchler are even caught in the picture.
In a series of interviews, local residents comment on the former cinema, on films in general, and on Wim Wenders’s "Paris, Texas" in particular. A funeral home director, for one, compares his work with that of a film director.
In "Grand Paris Texas", narratives and metanarratives are intricately interwoven — for instance, in the involvement of a VHS tape of Wenders’s film that was found by the artists in a video store in Paris, Texas. Years ago, another video renter had accidentally overwritten the last section of the film, making it impossible to discover how the story of Paris, Texas ends. This anecdote can indeed be interpreted as a reference to the open narrative techniques employed by Hubbard and Birchler.

Teresa Hubbard, born 1965 in Dublin, Ireland, and Alexander Birchler, born 1962 in Baden, Switzerland, have been working together since 1990. Their works have been shown in numerous biennials, including the Venice Biennale (1999), the Busan Biennale (2008), or the Liverpool Biennial (2008) and in exhibition venues like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
In 2008, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth dedicated a comprehensive solo exhibition to the artist duo with No Room to Answer. Now with No Room to Answer – Projections, the Württembergischer Kunstverein is focusing on a wide selection of video installations by the artists. A further variation on the exhibition will be offered this fall by the Aargauer Kunstmuseum in Aarau, Switzerland, at the same time as our show at the gallery.

Source: Württembergischer Kunstverein

Opening: Friday 11. Sept. 2009, 7 - 9 pm

Galerie Barbara Thumm
Markgrafenstrasse 68 D - 10969 Berlin

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