Performance, Seminar

Artist Uriel Orlow explores blindspots of historical representation in his work and often takes specific locations and events as starting points. Orlow’s most recent project The Short and the Long of It, for instance, documents the failed passage of fourteen international cargo ships through the Suez Canal in 1967. While the crews remained stranded for more than eight years until the canal was reopened, their cold-war political allegiances gave way to the establishment of a communal social system. Orlow interweaves vintage films and photographs shot by crew members with his own footage captured years later on location.

In a joint collaboration between the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Cooper Union School of Art’s Interdisciplinary Seminar, Orlow presents his lecture-performance Aide-Mémoire. Aide-Mémoire taps into the modes of the travelogue, the old-fashioned slide-show, and the ubiquitous powerpoint presentation. Imagined as a collection of scattered fragments of a possible future film and the salvaged shards of research already made, the lecture-performance presents chains of associations, visual clues, and narrative fragments that are woven into new configurations and reconstructed meanings.

Aide-Mémoire creates interplay between word and image and explores mechanisms and metaphors of memory and representation. Biblical Mount Ararat, a Ghost Town in Northern Armenia on the site of an earthquake, a Kurdish village in Turkey built out of the rubble of an ancient Armenian monastery, death masks of Soviet luminaries —all conjure symbols from the past and the future of history.

Uriel Orlow has participated in major international biennials including Manifesta 9; Swiss Pavilion/54th Venice Bienniale; 8th Mercosul Biennial Porto Alegre Brazil; 3rdGuangzhou Triennial Guangdon; as well as group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; South African National Gallery; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and ICA, London. Solo shows in 2012 include Alexandria Contemporary Image Forum; Prefix ICA, Toronto; Oslo Kunstforening; and Kunsthaus Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland. More information can be found at www.urielorlow.net.

Presented in collaboration with the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisplinary Seminar.