RESTAGING CONTEXT:
Theatricality in contemporary media
8 July - 11 September 2011
While the theatre and stage have been explored throughout art history, the relatively recent proliferation of performance, photography and video art have provided a new set of practices with which contemporary artists can examine these concepts today. Over the past years, exhibitions have been organized internationally – such as “The World as Stage” at Tate Modern in 2005 and “A Theater without Theater” at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2007 – to consider the role performativity and theatre have to play in shaping contemporary art.
With “Restaging Context: Theatricality in Contemporary Media,” the Camden Arts Centre has decided to contribute another facet to this ongoing dialogue through the works of four international artists: Ulla von Brandenburg, Eve Sussman, Mark Lewis and Yeondoo Jung. These artists employ the devices and visual cues of the theatre to recontextualize different subjects ranging from theatricality itself to art historical references, to the techniques of cinema. Through the mechanisms of the stage these ideas re-emerge in a contemporary framework, forcing spectators to consider how they establish perceptions, meanings and narratives from images.
The work of Ulla von Brandenburg focuses on the theatre as a construction. In her tableaux vivants she stages her actors performing carefully crafted poses or gestures, which are taken from different sources and gathered together in a single scene. Additionally, by eliminating dialogue from her works, von brandenburg draws the viewer's attention to the subtle changes in the body that are tipically overlooked. theatre is explored also in her paintings and her big installations and her whole production can be seen as a coherent and open-ended oeuvre.
Mark Lewis’ short films investigate the idea of the moving image and focus on the conventions of filmmaking. In his two works included in the exhibition, he adopts the now obsolete technique of the rear projection. In employing this tool today, Lewis subverts a device originally used to create an illusion of reality, rendering its artificiality completely apparent to the viewer and conveying a sense of disconnection between time and space, between the action and the situation.
Canonical paintings provide the starting point for Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, which are restaged in their original context or transferred into a contemporary one. Her relationship to these art historical references is not appropriative, however, as her films and productions stills reflect an interest in combining the intimacy of video with the narrative power of theatre to highlight the nature of group dynamics and the way simple gestures can suggest narratives.
Yeondoo Jung restages personal and collective histories through photographs and films where the real and the artificial are brought together in the actual space. These works are characterized by their evidently theatrical appearance. However, by avoiding digital manipulation of his images, these scenes were all played out in real-time, he draws attention to the failing distinction between reality and illusion in contemporary society and encourages viewers to think more critically about how they interpret images.