Bêka & Lemoine: Through the Lens of Domesticity

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea presents Bêka & Lemoine: Through the Lens of Domesticity, a MMCA Screenings: Films on Architecture program to bring focus on works by world-renowned architects, at the MMCA Film & Video cinema from Friday, May 18 to Sunday, May 20.   

The screenings will introduce films by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine who developed their works together over the last decade, experimenting new narratives and cinematographic forms in relation to contemporary architecture. Among the works that will be presented are selected six films that unfold their stories pertaining to the issues of domesticity; Koolhaas Houselife, The Infinite Happiness, and Moriyama-San that serenely portray how the architect’s vision melts into everyday lives from the viewpoints of the people who go through daily routines in houses designed by star architects such as Rem Koolhaas (OMA) and Bjarke Ingels (BIG), and Selling Dreams, Barbicana, and Homo Urbanus: Diary of Urban Wanderers that ask whether home sharing, collective housing, and city as a shared space could become a new social model for human dwelling.

Particularly notable is Moriyama-San which shows an extraordinary yet ordinary week from the life of Mr. Moriyama, an amateur connoisseur of art, architecture, and music who lives in the house designed by Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA), the 2005 winner of Pritzker Prize. It observes at close ranges the free-spirited homeowner who secludes himself in his house of an archipelago of peace and meditation in the middle of Tokyo, while recording the architecture as an experimental microcosm that overturns the notion of domestic space.

Films by Bêka and Lemoine question the image of buildings as a perfect, impeccable piece of work by a maestro seen in fantastic photographs, and highlight the vitality and the fragile beauty of architecture through stories of people who live, use, and take care of the buildings selected for the movies. The filmmakers’ intention is to convey architecture from an “internal” point of view that is personal and subjective, or rather, to have architecture convey itself.

The complete work of Bêka and Lemoine has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and their films have been shown at prestigious cultural institutions and events such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Centre Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal, and the Prada Foundation in Milan. With this program, MMCA hopes to bring attention to the importance of film as a medium for documenting architecture, and looks forward to the role that art museums will play as the site of exploration into the collaboration and symbiosis between architecture and film as an extension of visual arts.

There will be three screenings on Friday, May 18, and four each on Saturday, May 19 and Sunday, May 20, all at the Film & Video cinema of MMCA Seoul. On Saturday, May 19, filmmakers’ talk will take place after the screening of Selling Dream (34 minutes) and Moriyama-San (63 minutes) at 3:30pm, and provide the visitors with an opportunity to meet Bêka and Lemoine in person and gain insight into their works.

The complete program schedule and more details are available at the MMCA website.

Curator: Lee Jihoi

Contact communication: Jeong Junil, mmcaseoul@mmca.go.kr