Irit Batsry
Screen
October 2–November 9, 2013
aut aut arte contemporânea
rua alberto ribeiro 22
Rio de Janeiro
Brazil
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 14–18h
and by appointment
aut aut arte contemporânea is pleased to present Screen, a new installation by Irit Batsry in which the artist questions fundamental notions of cinematic vocabulary and the way images are created and perceived.
In Screen, Batsry divides the gallery space by installing Film Screen, a large hand crafted ‘screen’ composed of clusters of 35mm film held together by binders. Light, a video loop depicting projectors and reflectors on a film set being adjusted by the crew, is projected through this porous ‘screen,’ affirming light as a primary condition to the existence of the image and creating a complex image that includes the projected video, the shadows of the film clusters as well as ‘animated drawings’ composed of moving circles of light cast by reflections of the film clusters lit by the video projector. The viewers are able to enter ‘behind the screen’ into an unusual ‘projection booth’—the enclosed space between the screen and the walls on which the images appears.
Through the installation, the artist attributes new interpretations to cinematic concepts. Film, a time-based medium, becomes a spatial construction in which the viewer is able to enter the ‘hors champs’ and experience a tactile proximity with the film material, a rare relationship in a time when even film editors and projectionists are no longer working with the material. A video projector turns into a ‘film projector’ of sorts. Binding clips create new ‘edit points’ between images and scenes and when illuminated by the projection, evoke pixels spread inside the film screen. The image itself is no longer a simple outcome of projection but a complex hybrid.
Screen is part of an ongoing series of installations, created from material shot by the artist on the film sets of director Karim Ainouz in Brazil and initiated with Set, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003.
“Ms. Batsry operates in the gap between fiction and documentary. In Set she takes us into that gap to experience for ourselves a complexity that is as psychological as it is painterly, as literary as it is spatial. She displays an unusual ability to draw rich pictorial, symbolic and poetic resonances from the nuts and bolts of filmmaking….”
–Roberta Smith, “Irit Batsry: Set, Getting Caravaggio From Video, With Several Hearts of Darkness,” The New York Times, 9 January 2004
These words of Roberta Smith about Set are pertinent to Screen, an installation that questions cinematic language and experience and the relationship between the viewer and the moving image and between film and video.
Irit Batsry is an artist working in installations, video and photography. Her work has been exhibited in 35 different countries and is part of the collections of the Israel Museum, MoMA in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was awarded the Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award in 2002, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1992, the Grand Prix Video de Création of the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia in 1996 and in 2001, and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2002, as well as many fellowships, residencies and International festivals prizes.
Her work was shown at the National Gallery in Washington, the National Film Theater in London, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Museu d’Arte Moderna in Rio among others. In 2006 the Jeu de Paume in Paris organized a retrospective of her video work.
Irit Batsry was born In Israel in 1957, since 1983 she lives and works in New York and elsewhere.
For more info: www.iritbatsry.com and www.iritbatsryrecent.blogspot.com
