First Solo Exhibiton in Germany For Jonas Mekas
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=27088
November 8, 2008
COLOGNE.- Museum Ludwig will be presenting the first solo exhibition
in Germany by the film maker, poet and film critic Jonas Mekas. After
an odyssey lasting almost five years as a forced labourer in Germany,
and as a displaced person after the war, Jonas Mekas arrived in 1949
in New York. Here he dedicated himself in a whole host of ways to
film, not least as an event manager who opened up an increasing
number of possibilities for screening the New American Cinema -
before the Anthology Film Archive, which he co-founded, could at last
provide a home for the avant-garde film – from Sergei Eisenstein to
Carl Theodor Dreyer – as well as for the underground film and other
currents from 1970 on.
The main emphasis of the exhibition will be on Joan Mekas's artistic
and cinematic output, which will be shown in a dedicated film
programme and a number of installations in the various exhibition
spaces. Since the 1960s Jonas Mekas has developed his own distinctive
style which arose from his many years of documenting his daily life
and the passing events with a small hand-held camera, a Bolex. The
short diary-like sequences have been pieced together in such a way
that, when combined with his collages of original sound material, his
memories and commentaries spoken from off camera, or the noises he
colects, they are woven together into an exceptionally complex poetic
fabric. Since the early 1990s, he has taken this method, as
exemplified in such films as Walden or As I Was Moving Ahead
Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, and translated it into
the new media as "Frozen film stills", such as in New York with Love,
or video installations. Alongside his most recent work, Museum Ludwig
will be showing his large-scale 365 Day Project, for which Jonas
Mekas filmed one video every day for a whole year.
A catalogue will appear in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery,
London, published by Koenig Books, London. The exhibition, which has
been curated together with Jonas Mekas, has received the kind support
of the Roswitha Haftmann Stiftung LOGO, as well as the Maya Stendhal
Gallery, New York. It has been made possible by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
.
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