Out of Sync (July, 2024)

Cecile B. Evans, Cyprien Gaillard, Anri Sala, and Carolee Schneemann

Out of Sync: 27 June - 30 July 2024
Viewing Hours: Sunset to Sunrise, Daily

Selected by Vere van Gool

Anri Sala
Dammi i Colori, 2003
15 min, 25 sec
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Hauser & Wirth; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Rüdiger Schötle, Munich

Cecile B. Evans
Self-plagiarised Study for Lover One, 2015
2 min, 18 sec
Collection Cobra to Contemporary, Hugo & Carla Brown Courtesy the artist

Cyprien Gaillard
Pruitt Igoe Falls, 2009
6 min, 55 sec
Collection Cobra to Contemporary, Hugo & Carla Brown Courtesy the artist; Sprüth Magers

Carolee Schneemann
Souvenir of Lebanon, 1983 – 2006
6 min
Courtesy Estate of Carolee Schneemann; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Out of Sync is a video loop featuring work by Anri Sala, Cyprien Gaillard, Cecile B. Evans, and Carolee Schneemann on the differentiated ways moving image shapes our regard for others.

Cyprian Gallaird’s Pruitt-Igoe Falls depicts the demolition of a Glasgow housing block crossfaded with handy-cam footage of Niagara Falls. In reference to the infamous tearing down of the post-war housing project Pruitt-Igoe, coined as ‘the death of modernism’, Gallaird’s melancholic video portrays these public phenomena from the perspective of the passerby. In doing so, the artist positions its displaced residents as subjects to the visual representation of the reified spectacle, rendering their presence as viewers, or tourists, of their own destiny.

Carolee Schneemans’ Souvenir of Lebanon follows a video pan of destroyed Lebanese and Palestinian villages during 1982-83 Siege of Beirut. Footage documented by an anonymous journalist is intercut with black and white news clippings the artist found the day the Lebanese tourist office closed in New York City. Souvenir of Lebanon is the video component of Schneeman’s notable kinetic sculpture War Mop where a flailing mop attempts to wash off the a television screen every eight seconds, portraying symbolically the way mass media influences public understanding,

Anri Sala’s Dammi i Colori chronicles the transformation of Tirana through scenes of repainted buildings by its then mayor Edi Rama, set off against footage of its former drab surroundings. With the city as canvas, Damni i Colori visualizes the aesthetics of political representation, placing its residents as active participants of change. Titled after a lyric of the opera Tosca, the video explores the social relationship between people and government mediated by the agency of image.

Self-plagiarised Study for Lover One, a self plagiarizing work by Cecile B. Evans, follows floating lyrical phrases and itinerant creatures through scenes of destruction in Japan alongside ghost towns in the United States. Played to an abstracted 2005 American rap song by Chamillionaire, and accompanied by a self-portrait of the artist, the video points to the misadventures of ownership influenced by visual culture. 

– Vere van Gool, 2024