Screening

Two evenings of special screenings introduce The Greenroom, a large-scale exhibition exploring the “documentary turn” within recent contemporary art practice and its heritage in relation to the history of film, documentary photography, and television. Set to open in Fall 2008 at the The Hessel Museum and Center for Curatorial Studies Galleries (Bard College), The Greenroom, curated by CCS Program Director, Maria Lind, will feature works by more than forty artists and extend beyond the exhibition format to include a long-term research project and related publications.

The research project is a collaboration between The Center for Curatorial Studies, Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College, and the artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl.

These preview screenings, organized by curatorial assistant Fionn Meade, include selected works from artists participating in The Greenroom exhibition.

Selections from The Greenroom
Program 1 

Yael Bartana, Mary Koszmary (2007, 11 minutes)
Recently commissioned by the Foksal Foundation and Hermès, Mary Koszmary considers the complex legacies and realities of European anti-Semitism and xenophobia. A young man, played by Polish leftist author and politician Slawomir Sierakowski, enters an empty stadium and entreats the three million Jewish Poles who left Poland to return to their homeland while a troupe of Boy and Girl Scout-like youths stencil a message of hope for reconciliation across the stadium floor.

Rosalind Nashashibi, Ambassador (with Lucy Skaer) (2004, 5 minutes)
Playing with the rules of ethnographic framing, this monochrome study of the British Consul moving about his Hong Kong residence presents the enigma of a representative figure within an un-exoticized, quotidian context.

Matthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story (1999, 21 minutes)
Buckingham uses the cinematic space of film and video to stage personalized narratives that question the relationships between the living presence of the viewer, the phantasms of history, and the politics of institutions, archives, and cultural memory. Situation Leading to a Story recounts and complicates the artists having found four amateur movies dating from the 1920s in an abandoned box on a New York street.

Chantal Akerman, D’Est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction) (1993, 110 minutes)
D’Est retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. It is a voyage Akerman wanted to make shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc “before it was too late,” reconstructing her impressions in the manner of a documentary on the border of fiction. By filming “everything that touched me,” Akerman sifts through and fixes upon sounds and images as she follows the thread of a subjective crossing.