Aziz + Cucher
Some People
April 13–October 21, 2012
4000 Michigan Road
Indianapolis IN 46208-3326
Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher’s solo exhibition Some People contains four new video installations that will premiere at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The collaborative duo Aziz + Cucher have worked together for twenty years, addressing the major dilemmas of our time through large-format digitally enhanced photographs and video installations. Some People tackles a pressing historical subject that few artists have had the desire or convincing aesthetic ability to confront—the ongoing and relentless violent engagements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Both artists have familial and cultural roots in the Middle East. As confirmed Zionists, Cucher’s family recently immigrated to Israel, and his nephews serve in the Israeli army; while Aziz has cousins and extended family scattered across Lebanon. After witnessing firsthand the terror of 9/11 in New York, as well as the subsequent barrage of media images of violence related to the Middle East, they began to feel that they could no longer remain silent as artists and needed to confront this historic, unending cycle of human self-destruction.
The new body of work that they have created in response to this subject—Time of the Empress, In Some Country Under a Sun and Some Clouds, A Report from the Front, and By Aporia, Pure and Simple—represents a powerful aesthetic response to this seemingly unexpected personal recognition, after a career in which they have mostly repressed overt consideration of their personal identities in their work. The works that constitute Some People are non-narrative, but additive, and together they conjure a totalizing, tumultuous, absurd landscape simultaneously representing the past and present, creation and destruction. The installations fuse elements of documentary photography and video, drawing, animation, choreography, sound, performance, costume design, and theater to create a metaphor for human struggle and conflict.
Exhibition Catalogue
Aziz + Cucher: Some People will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the IMA in conjunction with Hatje Cantz, Germany. This publication is edited by the IMA’s Senior Curator and Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art Lisa D. Freiman with contributions by Tami Katz-Freiman, an independent curator based in Miami, and Richard Meyer, associate professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California. The catalogue will be available in the IMA’s Museum Store in fall 2012. In addition, the IMA is collaborating with Parsons The New School for Design on an interactive design fellowship for the production of a corresponding digital publication, which will also be available online in fall 2012.
About the Artists
Aziz + Cucher have been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; Stiftelsen Art Center, Bergen, Norway; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Photographer’s Gallery, London; and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. In 1995 Aziz + Cucher represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale.Their work is represented in permanent museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Museo de Art Contemporáneo, Leon, Spain; Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; National Gallery of Australia; Denver Museum of Art; and Galeria de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela.
Aziz + Cucher have received numerous awards, including the Ruttenberg Award from the Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, as well as grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Etants Donnés/The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Art Matters Inc. and Western States Art Federation/NEA.
