Allan Sekula
Disassembled Movies 1972–2012
September 12–October 31 2012
Akbank Sanat
İstiklal Cad. No:8
34435 Beyoğlu, İstanbul
Turkey
Hours: Tue–Sat, 10:30–19:30
akbanksanat [at] akbank.com
Akbank Art Center is pleased to present Allan Sekula: Disassembled Movies 1972-2012.
Curators: Marie Muracciole and Ali Akay
Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1951, Allan Sekula lives in Los Angeles. In 1971, in Southern California, as the American empire faced the crisis following its debacle in Southeast Asia, Sekula began combining writing and photography to document the political and economic situation of postwar military Keynesianism. In his notes for Aerospace Folktales (1973), Sekula first characterized his work as “a disassembled movie,” and this applies to much of his photographic work to the present.
The current exhibition centers on two states of one early slide show that recently has been translated into prints. Untitled Slide Sequence was shot in 1972 in San Diego, where the artist made a “motion study” of workers and managers leaving an aerospace factory. This seminal piece evokes the memory of one of the first movies, La sortie de l’usine Lumière (1895), while shifting attention to the immediate world of industrial society in the Nixon era.
The exhibition includes previously scripted and photographed but unprinted shorter projects called California Stories made between 1973–1979, and a double film projection consisting of the two rarely shown video works: Performance Under Working Conditions (1973) and Talk Given by Mr. Fred Lux … (1974). Taken together, these works employ masque, pantomime and fictional re-enactment to effect a satiric portrait of everyday social conflict, all the while raising myriad questions about the underlying conditions of documentary realism in response to the new, highly celebrated genre of “New Topographic” photography that arose in the mid-1970s.
In the wake of the huge photographic series that began with Fish Story in 1988, confronting the sea as a “primordial source of sublimity” as well as a paradoxical and largely invisible space for globalization, Sekula realized the acclaimed film The Forgotten Space (2010), co-directed with Noël Burch. Screenings of this film are scheduled to alternate with what Sekula considers a “rehearsal” for that project, Lottery of the Sea (2006). In Lottery, Sekula explores “a matrix of narratives–Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors, displaced populations, and the globalizing consequences of Adam Smith’s notion of the seafaring life as a form of “gambling.”
