calendario eventi  :: 

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14/2/2013

Two exhibitions

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BAM/PFA, Berkeley

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
MATRIX 247

As three ghostly voices share their stories, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2007 video installation Morakot (Emerald) lingers on dust, light, and memory in the empty rooms and hallways of a defunct Bangkok hotel. The Morakot Hotel was a haven for Cambodian refugees fleeing the Vietnamese invasion in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, however, the Thai economy had collapsed and the Morakot was forced to close its doors. Weerasethakul, a Thai artist best known for his feature-length independent movies, breathes life back into the abandoned hotel, using cinema as a vehicle for reincarnation and transformation. Morakot features the same fugitive memories that have given shape to over a decade of the director’s films, but here they are given space to roam. A green light hanging in the center of the installation casts an ethereal glow over the gallery, but the moving images onscreen exist in a more fantastical, absent world, a dreamscape for wandering in and out of time and consciousness.

Weerasethakul took inspiration for this installation from a 1906 Buddhist novel, The Pilgrim Kamanita, by Danish author Karl Gjellerup. The Kamanita’s protagonists, reborn as stars, tell one another tales over the course of centuries until they reach nirvana. Likewise, in Morakot, three actors (who frequently appear in Weerasethakul’s films) recount dreams, reminisce about hometowns, articulate regrets, and recite love poems. Although we hear them talking and laughing, we almost never see the actors on the screen, an absence that endows the work with a haunting sense of loss.

MATRIX 247 is organized by Assistant Curator Dena Beard. The MATRIX Program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis and the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees.

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Anna Halprin
MATRIX 246

“There was no chance in Parades and Changes,” recalls composer Morton Subotnick. “Everything was done by choice, but there was a freedom in choice.”

First performed in 1965, Anna Halprin's Parades and Changes pioneered the use of everyday movements and domestic rituals in dance, marking the onset of postmodern choreography. The dance revolves around a set of mundane tasks—unrolling giant sheets of plastic, stomping, interacting with the audience, handling objects, tearing paper, dressing and undressing. MATRIX 246 presents the final performances of Parades and Changes and displays scores, photographs, and other documentation of the history of the dance.

Before each staging of Parades and Changes, Halprin shuffles index cards that contain separate instructions for the dancers, crew, lighting and scenic designers, composers, and even the audience, and then posts the results. With so much left unrehearsed, each performance is an exercise in collaborative problem solving. Responses to the dance have varied from an outright ban on the work by the New York City Police Department in 1967 to adoring fan mail from a cattle farmer in Sweden.

Parades and Changes opened the current BAM/PFA facility more than forty years ago, and the new production—Halprin’s final staging of the piece—celebrates the architecture and history of our building as we prepare to move to our new downtown location in 2015.

Anna Halprin / MATRIX 246 is organized by Assistant Curator Dena Beard. The performances of Parades and Changes are made possible in part by The Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported by generous grants from ArtPlace, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Fleishhacker Foundation, Meyer Sound, and The Apartment, Vancouver. The performances are a fiscally sponsored project of Dancers' Group. The MATRIX Program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis and the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees.

Image: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, still from Morakot (Emerald), 2007; single-channel video projection; color, sound, 10:50 min., looped; museum purchase: bequest of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, by exchange.

Media Relations Manager:
Peter Cavagnaro (510) 642-0365 pcavagnaro@berkeley.edu

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BAM/PFA
Woo Hon Fai Hall 2625 Durant Ave. #2250 Berkeley, CA 94720-2250
Gallery hours
Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm; open till 9pm on L@TE Fridays; Closed Monday and Tuesday
Gallery Admission Prices
Free BAM/PFA Members
UC Berkeley students, faculty, staff, and retirees
Children (12 & under)
$10 Adults (18-64)
$7 Non-UC Berkeley students
Senior citizens (65 & over)
Disabled persons
Young adults (13-17)

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