A Trip to the Moon
Rosa Barba, Marco Brambilla, Dara Birnbaum, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Gordon, Georges Méliès, Alex Reynolds , Lindsay Seers, Lillian Schwartz, Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, Dziga Vertov, Ming Wong
8 February–8 April 2012
International conference in Stockholm 9–10 March
Before and After Cinema
Torsgatan 19
SE-113 90 Stockholm
Sweden
T +46 8 736 42 48
info [at] bonnierskonsthall.se
A Trip to the Moon is an exhibition on contemporary art’s relationship to film, and part of a series of exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall that explore exchanges between contemporary art and closely related art forms like theater and literature. The title refers to film pioneer George Méliès’s 1902 science fiction film of the same name—a whimsical fantasy about the technology of the future from the earliest days of cinema. It provides the starting point for an exhibition in which ten contemporary artists play with film and its history in combination with a selection of historical footnotes.
New digital techniques inevitably result in older film formats ending up in the graveyard of the obsolete and the superfluous. This means the loss of a certain way of seeing, of a way of making pictures, and of a particular feeling created by a technique. How those shift, those births and deaths in the history of moving image, influence and change art is a major theme of the exhibition. A parallel theme of the exhibition includes artwork that looks closely at how the history of film forms our way of envisioning the world and creates our secondary selves. Artists such as Douglas Gordon, Ryan Trecartin, Ming Wong and Alex Reynolds reuse and recast film narrative techniques, camera movements and characters originating from masters like Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman, as well as the wider context of the Hollywood star system and TV’s celebrity culture.
The love affair between art and film started the moment the film camera was invented. In order to explore the relationship that has always existed between art and film, we place the modern exhibition pieces alongside a number of historical films by, in addition to George Méliès, Dara Birnbaum, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Schwartz, and Dziga Vertov.
The exhibition will be followed by a new anthology, A Trip to the Moon, with contributions by the artists in the exhibition and writers like Sara Arrhenius, Christiane Paul, Don DeLillo, Jan Holmberg, and Gene Youngblood. Release date March 9.
Before and After Cinema
Conference 9–10 March, 2012
Cinema Sture,
Birger Jarlsg. 41 A, Stockholm
Before and After Cinema is an international conference on the status of the moving image in contemporary art, in the perspective of the shift from analogue to digital media, and what this means to distribution, perception, archiving and the making of art and film. The conference is a part of a larger collaboration between Bonniers Konsthall and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The conference is co-produced by Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Participants:
Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Artist
Sara Arrhenius: Director Bonniers Konsthall
Daniel Birnbaum: Director Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Dara Birnbaum: Artist
Jan Holmberg: CEO of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation and Curator of the Ingmar Bergman Archives
Magdalena Malm: Director Mobile Art Production, Stockholm
Christiane Paul: Director of Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Prof., School of Media Studies, The New School , Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art.
Ming Wong: Artist
For more information about the exhibition and the programme, please visit www.bonnierskonsthall.se. For press images, visit Bonniers Konsthall’s image bank on mynewsdesk.
For further information, please contact contact Sofia Curman, Information Officer at Bonniers Konsthall. sofia.curman@bonnierskonsthall.se, +46 8 736 42 66.
