CHANTAL AKERMAN and CAREY YOUNG
and THE FRONT ROOM
May 8 – August 2, 2009
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Boulevard
Saint Louis, MO 63108
Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space
Born in Belgium and living in Paris, Chantal Akerman is widely recognized as one of the most important directors in film history. Including a newly commissioned installation, Moving Through Time and Space spans more than two decades of her career, opening a window on to the shifting frames between fact and fiction. Exploring the politics of territorial borders, recent histories of racism, and the poetics of personal journeys, Akerman’s works touch on ideas about image, gaze, space, performance, and narration.
Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space is a collaborative effort of four institutions: Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Miami Art Museum (a MAC@MAM presentation); and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
and
Carey Young: Speech Acts
For her first solo exhibition in an American museum, British artist Carey Young launches a series of “call center art works,” which connect visitors with live telephone operators taking calls from a customer service center headquartered in Saint Louis. Investigating the links between art and globalized commerce as well as the legacies of Conceptual Art, Young challenges our assumptions about how we each interact with our social, commercial, cultural, and legal institutions. At the Contemporary, Young presents an innovative exhibition that contemplates the conditions of site-specificity, language, and our own capacity to communicate in the world.
Carey Young: Speech Acts is organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
THE FRONT ROOM
Provisional in nature—with projects lasting anywhere from one day to four weeks—The Front Room is an active space for experimentation and operates alongside the exhibitions in the Main Galleries to form a series of continuously renewed juxtapositions and relationships. The Summer 2009 Season features a series of four group shows with artists:
May 8 – 30: Olga Chernysheva & R.H. Quaytman & Josephine Pryde
June 3 – 28: Christopher Orr & J. Parker Valentine & Rezi van Lankveld
July 1 – 26: Sam Moyer & Lesley Vance & Stan VanDerBeek
July 29 – August 16: Douglas Ross & and Philip Vanderhyden
For more information on The Front Room, please visit www.camstl.org.
The exhibition and catalog have been generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO). Additional support for the catalog has been provided by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation. Support for Carey Young: Speech Acts is generously provided by Charter Communications, Catharine and Jeffrey Soros, and Irene and Grier Merwin. Special thanks to Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is generously provided by the Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Arts and Education Council; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS
With an artist-centered exhibitions program, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents the most relevant and experimental developments in contemporary art. The Main Galleries feature large-scale projects with two artists at a time, while The Front Room proposes short exhibitions by artists and others. The Contemporary makes the arts available to wide and diverse audiences throughout the Saint Louis metropolitan area by developing successful community partnerships, education programs, and outreach initiatives.
For more information on the Contemporary, visit www.camstl.org.
