Mika Rottenberg, Dough, 2006. Color video installation with sound. © 2011 Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
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Once Upon a Time, Installation Shot. Photo: Mathias Schormann. © Deutsche Guggenheim
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Once Upon a Time, Installation Shot. Photo: Mathias Schormann. © Deutsche Guggenheim
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Aleksandra Mir, First Woman on the Moon, 1999–.Color video with sound. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011
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Aleksandra Mir, First Woman on the Moon, 1999–.Color video with sound. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011
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Francis Al˙s. When faith moves mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montańas), April 11, 2002, Lima, Peru. Video installation. © 2011 Francis Al˙s. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
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Francis Al˙s. When faith moves mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montańas), April 11, 2002, Lima, Peru. Video installation. © 2011 Francis Al˙s. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
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Francis Al˙s. When faith moves mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montańas), April 11, 2002, Lima, Peru. Video installation. © 2011 Francis Al˙s. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
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Cao Fei , Whose Utopia, 2006. Color video, with sound. © 2011 Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou
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Janaina Tschäpe, Lacrimacorpus, 2004. Color video. © 2011 Janaina Tschäpe, Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
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Janaina Tschäpe, Lacrimacorpus (Ettersburg III), 2011. Chromogenic Print. © 2011 Janaina Tschäpe, Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Deutsche Guggenheim Edition No. 56
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From July 8 through October 9, 2011, the Deutsche Guggenheim presents important video artworks from the New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection in the exhibition Once Upon a Time: Fantastic Narratives in Contemporary Video. The show investigates how contemporary artists adapt motifs and narrative techniques from myths, fables, and fairy tales and incorporate them in their video installations to mirror current social phenomena and events in recent history. The exhibition features a selection of works by Francis Al˙s, Cao Fei, Pierre Huyghe, Aleksandra Mir, Mika Rottenberg, and Janaina Tschäpe.
Aleksandra Mir and Francis Al˙s manipulate belief in similar ways, imagining tales of collective emancipation. In First Woman on the Moon (1999– ) Mir reenacts the historic 1969 lunar landing with female astronauts on a beach in the Netherlands. The event is a feminist sequel to the original mission, extending the mediated legend.
Similarly, Al˙s fabricates a modern urban myth in When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montańas, 2002). For this work, approximately five-hundred volunteers shoveled sand up and over a dune in the outskirts of Lima, Peru, until the mountain moved about ten centimeters from its original position. The endeavor demonstrates the potential power of a collective working together toward a goal, even one so fleeting.
Janaina Tschäpe explores historical memory in Lacrimacorpus (2004), in which she adopts the legend of the squonk or Lacrimacorpus dissolvens, a sorrowful creature who, when trapped, dissolves into a pool of its own tears. Tschäpe’s creature inhabits the Schloss Ettersburg, near Buchenwald, notable for both its literary and horrifyingly tragic history.
The protagonist in Pierre Huyghe’s One Million Kingdoms (2001), manga character Annlee, intertwines astronaut Neil Armstrong’s account of the first moon landing (from which her voice is digitally derived) with passages from Jules Verne’s 1864 novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre), mapping the landscape as she speaks.
The fables presented by Mika Rottenberg and Cao Fei use fantastical tropes to dramatize alienation in an industrial context. In Whose Utopia (2006) Cao examines the effects of capitalism on individual workers at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. factory in the Pearl River Delta. In Dough (2006) Rottenberg seeks to counterbalance the dehumanization of work by creating an absurd assembly line manned by laborers whose bodily excretions and extraordinary physiques play a part in the literal sweatshop.
Each work in Once Upon a Time tells a story and leaves the viewer subtly altered by the possibilities for transformation of human, political, and social conditions.
Once Upon a Time has been organized by Joan Young, Guggenheim Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, and Manager, Curatorial Affairs.
As Deutsche Guggenheim Edition No. 56, Janaina Tschäpe created the C-Print Lacrimacorpus (Ettersburg III), 2011. The work is available exclusively in a limited and signed edition of 20 + 5 A.P. copies in the Deutsche+Guggenheim SHOP.
Details on the lecture and reading program can be found at deutsche-guggenheim.de.
Once Upon a Time: Fantastic Narratives in Contemporary Video
July 8 until October 9, 2011
Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin
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