31 May – 4 August 2002
Opening: 30 May, 7 p.m.
The American artist Dara Friedman is showing her first comprehensive museum exhibition in Europe at the Kunstmuseum Thun. The artist has been known to a larger public at the latest since she took part in the New York Whitney Biennial 2000. Friedman works with the medium of film – sometimes with video – which she integrates into room installations. For her, film is a sculptural tool. On show at the Kunstmuseum Thun will be a selection of works from the past five years, plus a new work specially created for this particular exhibition.
In Total (1997) the artist demolishes the complete interior of a hotel room. In the film, the course of the action is chronologically reversed so that the destruction is cancelled out. Here aggressive energy is offset by a surreal sleight of hand, levels of reality are put into question. In the triple projection Chrissy, Mette, Kirstan (2000) the artist works with the dimension of time, using its inherent laws within the context of film. In doing this Dara Friedman alludes to a standard advertising aesthetic: Young women unbutton their blouses in the draft of a ventilator, only to button them up again in a reverse movement. At the same time, the pleasant aspect is weakened by the cadences of a forceful soundtrack. In Romance (2001) the artist takes up a traditional cinema topos – the screen kiss. Here we see a whole series of couples kissing in a park in Rome filmed in a quasi-documentary manner. As the intimate moment is repeated countless times, it is both heightened and banalized.
The way Dara Friedman handles the medium of film differs from how it is used in the traditional cinema context. The whole setting of cinema is designed to remove the spectators from the real world for a certain time so as to immerse them fully in the reality of the film. In her work, Dara Friedman focuses not so much on the seductive surface of the medium as on all the other significant elements: projector, film reel, projection and space. Along with Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas and Rachel Khedoori, Friedman belongs to a younger generation of artists who have reintroduced the medium of film into the art context. They thereby partly allude to artist like Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Bruce Nauman, who in the 1960s and early 1970s already worked with films projected into space.
Dara Friedman was born in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, in 1968 and lives in Miami. She studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, the Slade School of Fine Art in London and the School of Motion Pictures at the University of Miami. In the recent past Dara Friedman has had solo exhibitions, among others, at the Miami Art Museum (2001), Site Sante Fe, New Mexico (2001) and the MCA, Chicago (1998).
Catalogue (German/English), edited by Madeleine Schuppli, Kunstmuseum Thun, ISBN 3-906537-10-2, price: CHF 16.–
