Aria Dean: Production for a Circle / Hannah Weinberger: we didn’t want to leave / Giovanni Cioni: Short films

Aria Dean
Production for a Circle
October 17, 2019, 7pm

In Production for a Circle, written and directed by artist Aria Dean, two young, fashionable couples convene for dinner and everything loses its shape. The four characters–A, B, C, and D–pass through a crisis of subjecthood, causing them to lose sight of themselves, of each other, and of the boundaries between them. Without a distinct sense of self, the otherwise individual actors become interchangeable vessels. Together, they lose coherence and become a chorus with no object to speak of, delivering a text about the experience of being emptied out and filled back up with nothing.

Production for a Circle’s inquiry into subjectivity, meaning, and communication draws on Dean’s ongoing artistic research and practice into reconfigurations of the subject posed in discourses across art, philosophy, and critical theory. It investigates the deterioration of the coherent, free-willing individual and an escape from what Deleuze and Guattari called the “abstract machine of faciality.” Production for a Circle does not actively theorize another specific way of being, but drags its characters to the edge of the void where it might be found. We leave them wanting to be new.

Production for a Circle also marks a shift in Dean’s practice toward an exploration of the relationship between theater, film, and sculpture, employing dramatic narrative for theoretical ends. The production is performed in-the-round on a minimalist set and captured by a 360 degree camera placed at its center.

Aria Dean (b. 1993) is an artist, writer and curator based in New York and Los Angeles. She is Assistant Curator of Net Art & Digital Culture at Rhizome.

Hannah Weinberger
we didn’t want to leave
November 8, 2019–January 5, 2020

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is pleased to present we didn’t want to leave, a major solo exhibition by Hannah Weinberger. Collaboration and participation are the hallmarks of Weinberger’s artistic practice. Her works rely on the potential of sound and the characteristics of the spaces invested to foster collective gatherings or endow spectators with a performative role. The background noises caught red-handed, the atmospheric buzzes of social life, and the synthetic percussive rhythms generated by crowds often constitute the preface of Weinberger’s pieces. Her sound compositions streamline social cacophony into minimal soundtracks, free of dramatic crescendos, referential tempos, or algorithmic prowess.

As visitors enter the exhibition, they, like musicians, activate and orchestrate it. In order to offer a unique and ephemeral immersive experience, the artist carried out extensive technical research with experts, developing a mechanism that is barely perceptible, despite its complexity. Rather than offering a journey with a final destination, Hannah Weinberger seeks to situate the audience within a full awareness of the moment and present space. In this way, we didn’t want to leave evokes this sound flow in movement, in the grip of the visitor’s drift. One can stop, observe, or simply let oneself be carried away by the waves they generate.

Hannah Weinberger (b. 1988) is a Swiss artist living and working in Basel. She holds a master’s degree in visual arts from the University of Fine Arts in Zurich.

This exhibition is produced with the support of Societe Generale Private Banking Switzerland as main partner.

Giovanni Cioni, a filmmaker of the invisible
Now online on the 5th Floor

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève’s online space, the 5th Floor, serves as a platform for digital production but also aims at rediscovering and giving visibility to material that would otherwise not be seen. 

Online now are three silent films by Giovanni Cioni (b. 1962), a filmmaker of the “loss of landmarks.” In his unconventional films, his camera becomes an explorer, transforming the environment within his reach into unknown territory. The three films visible on the 5th Floor represent a series of “silent films to listen to” made during the 1990s in various cities.

Curated by Andrea Bellini