Mark Lewis
Landscapes
16 November 2005 - 10 February 2006
National Museum of Contemporary Art, MNAC Bucharest
2-4, Str. Izvor, aripa E4, Bucharest (RO), 050563
guest curator: Enrico Lunghi, Director Casino Luxemburg
curator: Ruxandra Balaci
coordinator: Suzana Dan
“Film is an old invention,” says Mark Lewis. “It’s a bit dusty, and artists are picking over its remains, re-thinking its history.” Fascinated by cinema, its social phenomenon, and its power to seduce, Mark Lewis began to experiment with film in the mid-1990s. The artist premises much of his work on the idea that cinema is entering its terminal phase as the medium of choice for mass artistic expression. Mark Lewis’ productions have closer ties to the world of independent cinema than to the low-tech video art projects of the recent past. Landscapes is a selection of ten most recent video works of the artist (2001-2005), and will be hosted in MNAC for three months.
I like the slowness with which Mark Lewis takes me through the landscapes he has chosen and I revel in the unlikely scenes he has built up. The former gradually gives physical density to my gaze, while the latter calls for reflection and awakens the visual memory, this library of images that we carry around in our heads and whose stacks fill up more or less intentionally. The means Mark Lewis brings into play for this double game between the body and the intellect are deceptively straightforward: a direct take, a camera that is still nearly all the time and an action that fits in naturally with the scenery. Enrico Lunghi, guest curator
Mark Lewis work is about time and space. It is about the inexorable flow of time; about alienated atmospheres, impersonal architectures and wasted landscapes conveying psychologically latent feelings: of life and death, of micro and macro, of order and chaos, of entropy and anti-entropy, of the interplay between the simple and the inordinately complex. It is about atomized singularities in Brownian trajectories about contemporary solitude Ruxandra Balaci, curator
Recognized both in North America and in Europe, Mark Lewis films have been featured in many solo exhibitions and have been presented in group exhibitions that have conceptualized the growing interest of contemporary artists in the temporal and narrative properties of film: Re-makes at CAPC Musée dart contemporain de Bordeaux, and (Based upon) True Stories, at Witte de With in Rotterdam, en 2003; Liverpool Biennal at the Tate Liverpool, in 2002; Mois de la Photo à Montréal, in 2001; Intelligence: New British Art 2000 at the Tate Britain in London, in 2000; Cinema! Cinema! The Cinematic Experience at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum dEindhoven, in 1999; and Leffet cinéma, at the Musée dart contemporain de Montréal, in 1997.
MNAC, The National Museum of Contemporary Art
2-4, Str. Izvor, aripa E4, Bucharest (RO), 050563
general director: Mihai Oroveanu
artistic director: Ruxandra Balaci www.mnac.ro
Cosmin Tapu
Communication & IR Dept. / tel. 40 721831385
The National Museum of Contemporary Art
