Gianni Jetzer

Curator-at-Large, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Incoming Director, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

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Movies Without Pictures

Swiss Institute, New York

May 13–15 2007

Spanning several decades of work in film, video and cinema, artists treated the blank screen as staging-ground for subversive storytelling and genre-expanding experimentation. During the 1960s and ’70s, avant-garde filmmakers such as Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad used the imageless frame to test the boundaries of the cinematic experience. In dialogue with the structuralist films of the past, artists today engage the blank screen in an effort to formulate poignant visual statements, exploring narrative, its linguistic form and political content, to question the sovereign power of the image.

Co-curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen

Louise Lawler, “Marquee for ‘A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture’ (1979), Aero Theatre, Santa Monica, California, December 7, 1979” (courtesy the artist)

Artists:

Rosa Barba, Tony Conrad, Guy Debord, Derek Jarman, Louise Lawler, Adam Leech, Vincent Meessen, Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen,  Walter Ruttman, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Sahar Suliman