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The Nasher Goes Video
Several recent and upcoming exhibitions at
the Nasher Museum of Art lean heavily on video and new media as
a means of expression. While some are inspired by masterpieces
of painting, others draw on current events and cultural shifts.
On view this summer was a preview of The
Rape of the Sabine Women,
a new work by artist Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, a twenty-two
member company of actors, artists, dancers, and musicians, with
whom she collaborates.
The hourlong video-musical, inspired by the French neoclassical
painter Jacques-Louis David's masterpiece The
Intervention of the Sabine Women (1794-1799), which documents the ancient Roman abduction
myth, plays on a continuous loop on a large screen as the sole
exhibition in one of the museum's main galleries. The Nasher Museum
is the first venue to preview the video, a work in progress that
Sussman and the Rufus Corporation will continue to edit before
it moves to Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and other venues to be
announced.
The Rufus Corporation's sources for the project include contemporary
news photography; paintings by David, Peter Paul Rubens, and Nicolas
Poussin; early modern architecture in Greece and Berlin; and experimental
films of the 1960s. The video was shot on location in Greece and
Germany. It features choreography by Claudia de Serpa Soares, costuming
by Karen Young, and an original score by composer Jonathan Bepler.
The Rape of the Sabine Women is a modern process piece that pits
the mid-twentieth-century ideal of "better living through
design" against such eternal themes as power, longing, aggression,
and desire. Months of improvisation went into creating a work in
which a banal love triangle grows to epic proportions. Women and
children ultimately intervene in a battle that develops from the
modernist dream gone awry.
At the Nasher through October 1 is "Memorials of Identity," an
exhibition of nine new media works by seven international artists,
from the Miami-based Rubell Family Collection. The works, all DVD
video projections, examine the impact of historical change on individual,
cultural, and national identity and embody personal responses to
national trauma and the effects of globalization. They include
titles such as Sprawlville, Ubu Tells the
Truth, and History of the Main Complaint. Each video, less than
thirty minutes long, will be on view as a continuous loop in separate
screening spaces in one of the museum's main galleries.
The Rubell Family Collection, comprising work from the 1960s to
the present, is one of the leading collections of contemporary
art in the world. Don and Mera Rubell began the collection in the
1960s; their son, Jason Rubell '91, has helped expand it.
Later in the fall, the Nasher welcomes "Between Past and Future:
New Photography and Video from China," an exhibition that
examines photo and video art from China produced since the mid-1990s.
It will be on view October 26 through February 18, 2007.
The exhibition includes more than 100 works by sixty young artists
and focuses on artists' responses to the unprecedented economic,
social, and cultural changes that have swept through China. The
show provides insight into the forces shaping modern Chinese culture. "Between
Past and Future," according to museum officials, contributes
to a new understanding of the different ways that younger Chinese
artists have come to perceive themselves and their communities.
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