The Walker Art Center presents Platforms: Collection and Commissions
Established and emerging, historical and contemporary. Platforms: Collection and Commissions is a different kind of moving image exhibition, displaying work across multiple interfaces—from the palm of your hand to the wall of the gallery. The show highlights key works from the Walker’s collection juxtaposed with new commissions by 12 international contemporary artists. Every seven weeks, a new grouping will be rotated into the space, encouraging viewers to return and experience yet another new perspective. These commissions will be available online November 1.
Between 2014 and 2018, the Walker commissioned this series to respond to the influence and inquiry of leading artists and filmmakers in the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. The new works bridge generations: the contemporary artists create a piece inspired by the work of a specific predecessor. The dynamic initiative weaves together production, scholarship, distribution, and archival research.
The show’s first installment features the collaborative work Crossing (2016) by Leslie Thornton and James Richards, Leslie Thornton’s They Were Just People (2016), and Bruce Conner’s CROSSROADS (1976), his iconic film of the 1946 Bikini Atoll nuclear test. Thornton’s commission piece is a chilling, personal response to Conner: an exploration of the purpose and repurposing of memory during wartime. She combines her own manipulated footage of the La Brea Tar Pits in California with an oral account describing moments in the immediate aftermath of the 1945 US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. Thornton and Richards, on the other hand, draw inspiration from Conner’s interest in collage and archives and his use of psychedelic abstractions.
Subsequent installations in Platforms will include pieces by James Richards and Moyra Davey, inspired by British filmmaker Derek Jarman; Shahryar Nashat and Uri Aran’s works based on the films of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers; and commissions by Yto Barrada, Renée Green, Marwa Arsanios, and the duo of Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, all influenced by German filmmaker Harun Farocki. The exhibition will conclude with two new projects produced in 2018 by filmmakers Kevin Jerome Everson who responded to William Klien’s The Little Richard Story, and Deborah Stratman’s commission in response to American filmmaker Maya Deren.
Platforms: Collection and Commissions is on view from November 15 through August 25, 2019 in Gallery C.
Curator: Sheryl Mousley and Ruth Hodgins
Film Rotation Schedule:
Exchanging Histories
November 15, 2018–January 6, 2019
Leslie Thornton, They Were Just People, 2016
James Richards and Leslie Thornton, Crossing, 2016
Bruce Conner, CROSSROADS, 1976
Shared Cultures
January 8, 2019–February 24, 2019
Yto Barrada, Ether Reveries (Suite for Thérèse Rivière no.2), 2017
Renée Green, ED/HF, 2017
Harun Farocki, Interface (Schnittstelle), 1995
Inhabited Figures
February 26, 2019–April 14, 2019
Shahryar Nashat, Present Sore, 2016
Uri Aran, Two Things About Suffering, 2016
Marcel Broodthaers, Figures of Wax (Jeremy Bentham), 1974
Sonic Landscapes
April 16, 2019–June 2, 2019
Moyra Davey, Notes on Blue, 2015
James Richards, Radio at Night, 2015
Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993
Political Presence
June 4, 2019–July 21, 2019
Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Telepathic Improvisation, 2017
Marwa Arsanios, Who is afraid of ideology? Part 1, 2017
Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969
Re-Imagining Life
July 23, 2019–August 25, 2019
Kevin Jerome Everson, music from the edge of the allegheny plateau, 2018
Deborah Stratman, Vever for Barbara, 2018
Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943