In the five years since it first opened, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
has featured the medium of photography in a succession of
one-person exhibitions. The most recent of these was of Ed van der
Elsken, an artist equally interested in still photography and in film.
'Teatro Amazonas' at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is an exhibition of
films and photographs by the American artist Sharon Lockhart (born
1964), with particular emphasis on a series of new pieces. Lockhart's
latest body of work was created on visits to two separate locations in
the Amazonas region of Brazil, both of which she visited in the
company of anthropologists.
In her pictures of a fishing village on the island of Apeú-Salvador and
of rubber-tapping settlements along the Rio Aripuanã, she explores
the complex relationship between photography and film, and their
changing status as documentary media. A selection of earlier work is
included for purposes of comparison.
Lockhart discovered the 'Teatro Amazonas' in Manaus through Werner
Herzog's film 'Fitzcarraldo' (1982) and became fascinated by the
building itself and by the history of its foundation. She at once
conceived the idea of exploring the building and the city in a film of
her own.
With the help of a demographer, Lockhart invited 308 people, a
representative statistical sample of the population of Manaus, to
come to the opera house. She installed a fixed camera and filmed
the audience as it sat in the ornate auditorium for half an hour, while
a choir, out of sight in the pit, sang Minimalist compositions. The
tension in the audience relaxed very gradually. As the choir sang ever
more softly, the hearers began to revert to their own concerns; so
that eventually no music was to be heard, only the sounds made by
the audience.The music, composed by Lockhart's collaborator, Becky Allen, consists
of a single decrescendo on one note. It starts deafeningly loud, with
twelve groups of five singers each, all intoning a cyclic sequence of
local vowel sounds, and dwindles until all that is left is one barely
audible group.
In addition to this film project, Lockhart took two series of
photographs: one recording a seventeen-day journey along the
Aripuana river, on which she was accompanied by an anthropologist,
and the other taken on the island of Apeú-Salvador.
At every stopping-place along the river, the anthropologist conducted
interviews with the families who lived there. Lockhart then
photographed the location of each interview, together with a number
of pictures from the family albums of the people concerned. The
Apeú-Salvador photographs were taken in the course of a single visit
to the island and concentrate more directly on individual people and
groups, so that they fall far more clearly within the category of
portraiture. Lockhart's photographs of families reflect a variety of
configurations. In some cases she left them to pose themselves; in
others she prescribed the arrangement.
The two photographic series 'Enrique Nava Enedina and Chronicle of
Masonry Work' (both 1999) are records of re pair work done on the
stone floors of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
They thus pursue two themes: that of work, and that of the museum
as a scientific institution and public exhibition site
'On Kawara: Whole and Parts' (1998) consists of four large
photographic prints recording the changeover between shifts of gallery
attendants at an exhibition of On Kawara in a museum in Tokyo.
Once more, Lockhart takes the museum as her theme; and with this
she combines the theme of time. Her choice of exhibition is a
resonant one. The Japanese artist On Kawara is one of the leading
representatives of Conceptual Art. His legendary 'Date Paintings',
made from 1965 to the present, are all about time as an abstract
entity.
The film 'Goshogaoka' and the series of photographs 'Goshogaoka
Girls Basket Ball Team' show a group of Japanese girl basketball
players training in a gym. Working with the choreographer St even
Galloway, Lockhart has encapsulated her impressions in a series of
six ten-minute segments. The result is a hybrid, combining the
real-time structure of documentary film with elements of
choreography and performance. Lockhart's artistic intention is a
complex one; she structures form and duration in such a way as to
capture the subtle cultural markers, as well as individual differences,
that emerge among the participants. The fixed camera, directed
straight toward the rectangle of the stage, the symmetry of the
minimalist choreography, and the equal length of the film segments
create a sense of order, an ideal context, that contrasts sharply with
the irregularity of the human detail in the film.
Planned in association with the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam, and the Kunsthalle Zürich, this exhibition offers the most
comprehensive survey to date of Sharon Lockhart's work.
The 1997 film 'Goshogaoka' (63 minutes) and the new film 'Teatro
Amazonas' (38 minutes) will be shown in Auditorium #1 at theAlvar-Aalto Kulturzentrum at the following times:
'Teatro Amazonas' (38 minutes), daily at 14:00
'Goshogaoka' (63 minutes), daily at 16:00
The exhibition catalogue extends to 125 pages and contains many
illustrations, together with a preface by Gijs van Tuyl, Bernhard Bürgi,
and Chris Dercon; articles by Timothy Martin and Ivone Margulies; a
list of exhibitions; bibliographical information; and a list of work in
the exhibition.
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