October 26, 2012–January 13, 2013
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
The University of Utah
Marcia and John Price Museum Building
410 Campus Center Drive
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
salt (sôlt)
n.
1. A colorless or white crystalline solid used extensively in ground or granulated form as a food seasoning and preservative.
2. An element that gives flavor or zest.
3. Sharp, lively wit.
4. A mineral sharing definitive characteristics with Utah’s capital city.
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is pleased to present salt 6: Emre Hüner, the sixth project in the Museum’s series of exhibitions introducing innovative art from around the world. salt aims to reflect the international impact of contemporary art today, forging local connections to the global, and bringing new and diverse artwork to the city that shares the program’s name.
As an artist, Emre Hüner travels between mediums and genres and geographies. Born in Istanbul and now based in Berlin, his practice encompasses drawing, animation, video, film, sculpture, installation, and printmaking. These diverse media are vehicles for ideas connected to dense constellations of literary, filmic, artistic, and scientific reference points. In this allusive universe, Hüner returns to certain themes again and again: modernist experiments, failed utopias, myths of technological progress. Juxtaposing an array of images, objects, and ideas, he constructs a fragmented archive of the past and the future, of fact and fiction, of the artificial and the natural.
salt 6 will debut a new film installation by Hüner, comprising two 16mm films projected onto sculptural structures evocative of early 20th-century Russian Constructivist-style kiosks. In the two films, Aeolian Processes #1 and #2, the camera shows us an array of objects—framed in close-ups or arranged as still lifes—that withhold immediate clues to their temporal or geographic origins. Archaic-looking tools mix with artifacts from the more recent industrial past, as if unearthed together many centuries from now. Hüner’swork seems to tell us what the past looks like from the perspective of a distant future.
Organized by Jill Dawsey, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and former chief curator at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the sixth salt exhibition opens on October 26, 2012 and will remain on view through January 13, 2013 in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building at the University of Utah. The exhibition will be located in the salt gallery on the UMFA’s second floor, adjacent to the Museum’s permanent collection of modern and contemporary art.
Born in Istanbul in 1977, Emre Hüner attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.
His work has been featured in exhibitions including Manifesta 9, Limburg, Belgium (2012); Paradise Lost, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2011); Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey (2010); Busan Biennial, South Korea (2010); The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (2009); The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York, (2009); Manifesta 7, South Tyrol, Italy (2008); 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2007); and Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, Albania (2007). Hüner has held artist residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2010); the apexart Inbound Residency Program, New York (2009); and at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul (2009).
Press contact:
Dana Hernandez, T 801 585 9880 / [email protected]
Museum hours:
Tuesday–Friday 10–5pm, Wednesdays 10–8pm, weekends 11–5pm; closed Mondays and holidays.
Programming:
A Conversation with Emre Hüner
Thursday, October 25 at 7pm
UMFA Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke, Jr. Auditorium
