Michel Auder @ Martos Gallery, NYC - 'Ghostwriter' Exhibition

Michel Auder: Ghostwriter

Martos Gallery, New York

September 11 - October 25, 2025

The figure of the ghostwriter—like a body double or shadow self—touches the fragile threshold between who we are and how we are perceived by others, between the stories we tell ourselves and the ways others inscribe us into their memories.

Embodying a kind of haunting, spectral presence, where another’s voice and agency subtly inhabit one’s space, the ghostwriter challenges the clear boundaries of the individual subject or author.

Throughout his life-long practice, Michel Auder has used the moving image to reflect on his own life, New York’s artistic milieu, and the world at large, often recording semi-staged performances and portraits of fellow artists from the downtown scene. His eye and his camera, in a Proustian sense, serve as instruments for capturing reality, while his ever-shifting approach to archive and memory organizes events into fluid, evolving realms of meaning.

This exhibition brings together traces, meshes, and specters of various poetic exercises, where ghostwriting—understood here loosely and fleetingly as a shadow of the self—becomes a way to practice distortion, unsettling both authenticity and the very concept of identity.

At the entrance to the gallery, Michel Auder presents Chasing the Dragon (1982), a fictional autobiography in which a day from the artist’s life—filtered, edited, mediated, and performed by another actor—becomes the “ghost” of the person, a doubled identity that can never fully capture its subject. The work also conjures the spectral presence of a long-gone New York City, an uncanny body-double on the verge of austerity and collapse.

The film Meshes of Derivatives (2025) explores emerging technology as a ghostwriting apparatus, where the vast archives amassed by our phones and the algorithmic organization of memory orchestrate a constant transformation of remembering and forgetting, choice and interpretation.

Finally, two new films—Hunters and MichelangelobyMichelauder (2025)—draw on personal imagery, existing works re-filmed by the artist, found footage, and material exchanged with the author of this text. These works direct the viewer toward the iconography of power and submission. By presenting art historical motifs in a dialogue with his characteristic subjective narration and a contemporary visual atlas, Auder offers surprising insights into the notions of erotic and spiritual self-abandonment. He explores these questions through the interchangeability of power roles and radical vulnerability, as seen in the depictions of Michelangelo’s captives and sleeping subjects. His lens lingers on states of total absorption in sleep and defenselessness, on folds of marble, heavy eyelids, and parted lips. Equality, dedication, and surrender intertwine in this hot mess, decoding different modes of being together with others. Here perhaps, we are all ghosts writing someone else's story.

MARTOS GALLERY

41 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10013

www.martosgallery.com

David Lynch Exhibition in Prague @ DOX Centre for Contemporary Art - "Up in Flames"

David Lynch: Up in Flames

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague

Through 8 February 2026

David Lynch in Prague, 1996 

Photo by Karel Cudlin 

© 400 ASA

David Lynch 

Man Laughing, 2013 

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch 

Playing with Fire, 2015 

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

The DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Czech Republic’s largest institution dedicated to contemporary art, presents the exhibition event of the year in its main hall: artistic work of American master of cinema DAVID LYNCH.

The project, on which DOX is collaborating with the David Lynch Estate, Pace Gallery, and Item éditions, is curated by Otto M. Urban. David Lynch: Up in Flames is the first presentation of Lynch’s art in the Czech Republic.

In the main spaces of DOX over four hundred works of art are on display – from drawings, photographs, lithographs, woodcuts, and watercolours to short experimental and animated films created by the director. The works span all of Lynch’s creative periods, from his early days in the late 1960s all the way to 2024.

“I consider it a small miracle that we are finally opening the exhibition. Without the enthusiastic cooperation of everyone involved, we could not have pulled off a project like this. Unfortunately, David Lynch, who oversaw the preparations for the exhibition from the very beginning, will not see the final result. Nevertheless, I hope that he would be satisfied with the exhibition, which I see as a tribute to a great artist and a great man,” says Otto M. Urban, the curator of the exhibition.

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX 

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX 

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX 

Deliberations regarding the project gradually developed over many years, and an important condition for its realisation was establishing direct contact with the artist himself. The first serious discussions about a David Lynch exhibition at DOX took place in the spring of 2024, when the David Lynch Studio (now the David Lynch Estate) and Pace Gallery joined the project. Patrice Forest of Item éditions in Paris was instrumental in facilitating this connection.

However, the preparations were unexpectedly interrupted by the news of David Lynch’s sudden passing on 16 January.

“David and I spoke about this show the day before he passed. He loved the images he’d seen of DOX and was looking forward to seeing his art in that space. He had confidence in Otto, and he was excited to share his work with the people of Prague. When he died, it seemed like the world stopped turning,” says Michael T. Barile from the David Lynch Estate.

David Lynch 

My House is on Fire - Modern Device, 2013

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

David Lynch - Works on paper

The main axis of the exhibition consists of works on paper, which Lynch considered to be autonomous artworks in their own right. He said that drawing helped him to capture ideas that he could later develop into films, paintings, or objects.

David Lynch studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was there that he had a vision of a moving painting, and in 1967 this vision became the basis for his first film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). Lynch drew throughout his career, and in his artistic work he was fascinated by all manner of different materials and surfaces.

A major part of the exhibition consists of works on loan directly from the David Lynch Estate in Los Angeles, but the project also includes a number of works (lithographs and photographs) which he created at Item éditions in Paris.

David Lynch 

Small Stories, 2014

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch 

Small Stories, 2014

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

Artist David Lynch

David Lynch (1946–2025) had a prolific nearly six-decade-long career, which spanned an extensive range of artmaking, including painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, music, and film.

He wrote and directed critically acclaimed films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006), and the television series Twin Peaks (1990–91) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). While studying painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, David Lynch envisioned his first “moving painting”, a multidimensional composition beneath a moving projection titled Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967). This multimedia work marked Lynch’s first foray into video and filmmaking. His remarkable career touched on subjects of the organic body and industrial sites in various states of decay, describing a deeper human experience both beyond and within the everyday. Often depicting scenes with an eye towards surrealism and mystery, Lynch’s work balanced on the porous divide between the body and the world it inhabits.

Lynch’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions. Retrospectives of his work include The Air Is on Fire: 40 years of Paintings, Photographs, Drawings, Experimental Films, and Sound Creations at Fondation Cartier in Paris (2007), which then travelled to La Triennale di Milano (2008), the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation in Moscow (2009), and Gammel Strand in Copenhagen (2011); Between Two Worlds at QAGOMA in Brisbane, Australia (2015); Silence and Dynamism at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland (2017–18); and Someone Is in My House at the Bonnefanten in Maastricht, Netherlands (2018–19). In 2014, a survey of Lynch’s work entitled The Unified Field was presented at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where the artist previously studied painting.

David Lynch: Up in Flames - Organisational Team

The exhibition Up in Flames is curated by Otto M. Urban. The organisational team consists of Leoš Válka, Michaela Šilpochová, Jan Slavík, and Anna Bárová from DOX, Anna Skarbek and Michael T. Barile from the David Lynch Estate, and Genevieve Day from Pace Gallery.

Michael T. Barile and Anna Skarbek from the David Lynch Estate and Patrice Forest from Item éditions in Paris made significant contributions to the exhibition. Michael T. Barile, Anna Skarbek, and Patrice Forest were the guests of honour at the exhibition’s opening ceremony. The graphic design of the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue was entrusted to Robert V. Novák. The music was arranged by Marcel Bárta.

Authors of the exhibition David Lynch: Up in Flames

Curator Otto M. Urban

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Jan Slavík © DOX

Otto M. Urban – Head curator of the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, where he has prepared numerous exhibitions, including his latest project, David Lynch: Up in Flames. Since the early 1990s O tto M.Urban has focused on Czech and international art from the turn of the twentieth century, especially symbolism and decadence, as well as contemporary art.

Michael T. Barile

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Jan Slavík © DOX

Michael T. Barile – Executive assistant to David Lynch and employee at Asymmetrical Productions from 2008 to 2025. Michael T. Barile is an American film producer and writer who worked on several of Lynch’s projects, including Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Twin Peaks: Missing Pieces (2014), and What Did Jack Do? (2017) as well as numerous other commercials, music videos, and short films. He currently works for the David Lynch Estate.

Anna Skarbek

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Tomáš Cindr © DOX

Anna Skarbek – An American visual artist and educator who began working with David Lynch as assistant art director on his 2006 film INLAND EMPIRE. She subsequently worked with him on commercials, music videos, and experimental films, and she built and maintains the database that inventories all of Lynch’s artworks. Anna Skarbek has organised fifteen international museum exhibitions of Lynch’s work, overseen forty gallery exhibitions, and co-edited twelve accompanying exhibition catalogues.

Patrice Forest

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Tomáš Cindr © DOX

Patrice Forest – A close friend of David Lynch and director of the Item éditions lithographic studio in Paris. In 2007 Patrice Forest initiated David Lynch into the secrets of lithography during the time that Lynch was creating nearly three hundred works in the studio. Item éditions is the oldest lithographic studio in Paris, with presses used in the past by Picasso, Matisse, and Giacometti, to name just a few. The exhibition includes not only a large set of lithographs from Lynch’s production at Item éditions but also two photographic series of gelatin silver prints on Baryta paper titled Small Stories.

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

Poupětova 1, Prague 7

www.dox.cz

David Lynch: Up in Flames

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 19 june - 8 February 2026

Sarah Maldoror Films @ Centre Pompidou, Paris (Text in English)

Sarah Maldoror

Centre Pompidou, Paris 

Cinéma 1 | Level 1

April 3 - 7, 2025 

Sarah Maldoror @ Christine Lipinska 

Courtesy Annouchka de Andrade et Henda Ducados

Associated programme to the Black Paris exhibition

The "Black Paris" exhibition features the work of artist Sarah Maldoror, including one of her major productions, And the Dogs Were Quiet. Filmed in the collections of the Musée de l’Homme in 1978, this motion picture is built around filmed excerpts of Aimé Césaire’s drama And the Dogs Were Silent. During the exhibition, the Centre Pompidou’s cinemas are paying tribute to this unique filmmaker whose work documents and questions the present more than ever before.

A five-day event that includes screenings (all accompanied by artists and witnesses on whom Sarah Maldoror’s work has had a lasting influence), readings, encounters, and the presentation of previously unseen archives, invites the public to hear the filmmaker’s voice in the present. Restored versions of the films Monangambé (1969, 17 min), And the Dogs Were Quiet (1978, 13 min), Le masque des mots (1987, 47 min) and Regards de mémoire (2003, 24 min) will be presented for the first time in France thanks to the support of MansA – Maison des Mondes Africains. Sarah Maldoror’s 1979 trilogy composed of Carnaval in the Sahel (28 min), Fogo, Fire Island (34 min) and Carnaval in Bissau (18 min) will also be shown.

Filmmaker Sarah Maldoror’s life and career tie in with all currents of activism in the 20th century: surrealism, Négritude, Pan-Africanism, feminism and communism. 

Born Marguerite Sarah Ducados in 1929 to a mother from Gers and a Guadeloupean father, she chose the pseudonym Maldoror, inspired by Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror, rediscovered by the Surrealists during the interwar period. In 1956, Sarah Maldoror founded Les Griots, the first Black theater troupe in Paris. She later studied filmmaking in Moscow before directing her first short film, Monangambééé, in 1969. Her first feature film released in theaters, Sambizanga (1972), widely regarded as her masterpiece, was restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. 

Sarah Maldoror passed away in 2020, leaving behind a legacy of over 40 films, including both fiction and documentaries of varying lengths, shot in France, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Colombia, as well as numerous unrealized projects. Her work, deeply poetic and artistically driven, consistently explored struggles for independence, especially in African nations, alongside her companion, Angolan poet and anti-colonialist activist Mario Pinto de Andrade.

“We will never be free as long as you see us the way you do. We must free you from the idea you have of Black people so that we can be free Black people...” Sarah Maldoror declared to writer Marguerite Duras in a 1958 interview, encapsulating the direction of her life’s work.

She adapted and brought to the screen the portraits of numerous artists and intellectuals of the 20th century, including Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, Caribbean poet René Depestre, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, French figures Louis Aragon and Robert Doisneau, and Mexican painter Vlady Rusakov. Maldoror also collaborated with filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Gillo Pontecorvo, and William Klein.

As part of ongoing tributes, Sarah Maldoror’s work was featured in the exhibition "After the End: Maps for Another Future" at the Centre Pompidou-Metz from January 2025, and in the "Regards Satellites" festival at the L’Écran cinema in Saint-Denis, from January 29 to February 9, 2025. Carlotta Films released restored editions of Sambizanga, Monangambééé, and the Carnaval trilogy in a special box set in early 2025, accompanied by a dedicated issue of Avant-Scène Cinéma in February focusing on Sambizanga.

In spring 2025, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York hosts a complete retrospective of her films, followed by another in São Paulo in 2026.

CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS

centrepompidou.fr

Daniel Turner / Compresseur @ MACS, Grand Hornu, Hornu, Belgique/Belgium - Exposition/Exhibition - En Français/In English

Daniel Turner / Compresseur

MACS, Grand Hornu, Hornu, Belgique

15 décembre 2024 - 6 avril 2025

Scroll down for English Version

« Le fondement de mon travail est archéologique. C’est l’idée de localiser un lieu, d’aller dans ce lieu puis de le creuser. Quand je parle de ce processus de travail, j’utilise le mot « creuser » car, d’une certaine manière, je travaille comme un mineur amateur : localiser les matériaux, creuser pour chercher ces matériaux, extraire ces matériaux. » -- Daniel Turner en conversation avec Denis Gielen, New York, mai 2024

DANIEL TURNER

Compresseur, 2024

Extract from the film, 34’08’’

© Daniel Turner

DANIEL TURNER 

Three Sites, Kunsthalle Basel, 2022

Installation view: (Holdenweid) Burnish 1, 2022

© Daniel Turner

Photo © Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel

Daniel Turner, né en 1983 et installé à New York, a consacré les dix dernières années de sa carrière à la récupération et réappropriation d’infrastructures diverses. Il prélève sur des sites spécifiques des matériaux, des équipements et des résidus laissés par les personnes qui les ont occupés, qu’il transforme pour invoquer « l’esprit du lieu ». Pour sa première exposition muséale en Belgique, Daniel Turner s’est intéressé à un site particulièrement symbolique : l’ancienne prison de la commune bruxelloise de Forest.

DANIEL TURNER

(de Forest) Radiator Bar, 2024.

Iron sourced from Prison de Forest, 7 x 144 x 4 in.

© Daniel Turner

Photo © Philippe De Gobert

A la suite de sa fermeture en 2022, Daniel Turner a entrepris de documenter la prison, réalisant des enregistrements sur le terrain et collectant divers matériaux en résonance avec l’atmosphère carcérale. Des objets utilitaires de la prison – tels que des matelas en mousse, des poignées de porte, des rideaux et des néons – ont été soumis à des traitements chimiques ou mécaniques de diverses intensités. Les radiateurs en fonte, autrefois vecteurs d’énergie et sources de chaleur, ont été fondus et transformés en formes solides et minimalistes.

L’oeuvre de Daniel Turner nous invite à réfléchir sur l’influence des environnements sur nos expériences. À travers des distillations matérielles qui transposent à la fois le lieu et sa matérialité, Turner éveille des réactions psychologiques vives, tout en faisant preuve d’une grande économie de moyens.

Portrait of DANIEL TURNER

Photo © Aurélien Arbet

DANIEL TURNER

Daniel Turner, né en 1983 à Portsmouth, en Virginie, vit actuellement à New York (États-Unis). L’artiste a participé à de nombreuses expositions institutionnelles, notamment à la Chinati Foundation, à Marfa (Texas, États-Unis) ; à la Kunsthalle Basel, à Bâle (Suisse) ; au Kunstmuseen Krefeld, à Krefeld (Allemagne) ; au Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, à Deurle (Belgique), au Pinchuk Art Centre, à Kiev (Ukraine) ; aux Museen Haus Esters und Haus Lange, à Krefeld (Allemagne) ; au Kunstmuseum Thun, à Thun (Suisse) ; au Palais de Tokyo, à Paris (France) ; Muzeul de Arta Cluj-Napoca, Roumanie ; Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France ; Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Varsovie, Pologne ; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Autriche ; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japon ; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France ; et The Maria Leuff Foundation à New York. Les oeuvres de Turner sont présentes dans des collections privées et publiques, parmi lesquelles le S.M.A.K. de Gand, le Kunstmuseum de Bâle, le Centre Pompidou-Paris, le FRAC Bretagne, l’ICA de Miami, le Musée des Arts Contemporains au Grand-Hornu et bien d’autres.

ENGLISH VERSION

Daniel Turner / Compresseur

MACS, Grand-Hornu, Hornu, Belgium

December 15, 2024 - April 6, 2025

‘‘The basis of my practice is archaeological. This idea of locating a site and then going into the site and mining the site. When I speak about that work in the process, I speak in terms of “mining” because in a sense, I’m working as an amateur miner: locating materials, digging for materials, extracting the materials.” --Daniel Turner in conversation with Denis Gielen, New York, May 2024.

Daniel Turner, born in 1983 and based in New York, has spent the past decade of his career focused on salvaging infrastructures. From selected sites, Turner extracts materials, fixtures, and remnants left behind by former occupants, which he then transforms to evoke the «spirit of the place.» For his first museum exhibition in Belgium, Turner has chosen an especially evocative site: the former prison in the Brussels municipality of Forest.

Following its closure in 2022, Turner extensively documented the prison, conducted field recordings, and removed various materials that resonated with the impressions evoked by the carceral environment. Objects of utility sourced from the prison—such as foam sleeping pads, door handles, curtains, and fluorescent bulbs—have been chemically or mechanically processed to varying degrees. Iron radiators, once vectors of energy and sources of heat, were melted down and milled into solid, minimal forms.

Turner’s work invites the viewer to consider how environments shape our experiences. Through material distillations that transpose both place and materiality, Turner evokes psychological responses with a stark economy of means.

DANIEL TURNER was born in 1983 in Portsmouth, Virginia and currently lives and works in New York (USA). The artist has participated in institutional exhibitions including; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa Texas; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel Switzerland; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Krefeld Germany; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle Belgium; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev Ukraine; Museen Haus Esters und Haus Lange, Krefeld Germany; Kunstmuseum Thun, Thun Switzerland, Palais de Tokyo, Paris France; Muzeul de Arta Cluj-Napoca, Cluj România; Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France; the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw Poland; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck Austria; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Japan; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris France; and The Maria Leuff Foundation in New York. Daniel Turner’s works are held in private and public collections including; S.M.A.K. Ghent, Kunstmuseum Basel, Centre Pompidou, le FRAC Bretagne, ICA Miami, Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu amongst others.

MACS

Musée des Arts Contemporains

Site du Grand-Hornu

Rue Sainte-Louise, 82, B-7301 Hornu

www.mac-s.be

The Complete Robert Frank: Films and Videos, 1959–2017 @ MoMA, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

The Complete Robert Frank: Films and Videos, 1959–2017

MoMA, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

November 20 – December 11, 2024

It’s Real (C’est vrai). 1990 

France. Directed by Robert Frank 

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Hunter. 1989 

West Germany. Directed by Robert Frank

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Last Supper. 1992. 

Switzerland/USA. Directed by Robert Frank 

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Life Dances On… 1980 

USA. Directed by Robert Frank

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Life Dances On… 1980 

USA. Directed by Robert Frank

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Life-Raft Earth. 1969 

USA. Directed by Robert Frank

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Pull My Daisy. 1959 

USA. Directed by Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank 

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

In conjunction with the gallery exhibition Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue and the installation Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage, MoMA presents a complete retrospective of Robert Frank’s films and videos, many of them in new digital preservations and remasters, together with a modest selection of films relating to the artist and his circle of family, friends, and collaborators. Recognizing his important relationship with MoMA, Frank donated all of his unique film and video materials to its collection in 2015. These works span the entirety of Frank’s moving-image career, from his 1959 Beat psychodrama Pull My Daisy (co-directed by Alfred Leslie and starring the poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso; the artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel; and the actress Delphine Seyrig; with narration by Jack Kerouac) to his 2008 video Fernando, a touching portrait of a Swiss artist friend, and Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel, 1984 (2017).

Conversations in Vermont. 1971

USA. Directed by Robert Frank 

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

About Me: A Musical. 1971 

USA. Directed by Robert Frank 

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Robert Frank’s films profoundly altered his approach to making images. Out of restlessness and a passion for experimental risk-taking, Robert Frank all but abandoned photography for filmmaking in the late 1950s. When he returned to still photography in the early 1970s, his work had become less precious and singular. Instead, he subjected his still images to a variety of manipulations: scratching and painting directly on the negative or emulsion surface, and collaging and creating montages. The photographs began to resemble film sequences or storyboards: multiple frames of images with implied narratives and use of written texts as commentary. Films like Conversations in Vermont (1969) and About Me: A Musical (1971), autobiographical portraits of family life and community, were direct antecedents to deeply personal, intimate projects like his 1972 artist book The Lines of My Hand. The films’ seemingly improvisational quality also led to an interest in the immediate gratifications of Polaroids.

Me and My Brother. 1965-68 

USA. Directed by Robert Frank 

Courtesy The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

The series includes The Sin of Jesus, Frank’s 1961 adaptation of an Isaac Babel short story; OK End Here (1963), an intimate chamber piece featuring an original score by Ornette Coleman; and Me and My Brother (1965–68), his first feature, a faux vérité involving Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Chalkin (founder of the off-Broadway Open Theater company), Peter Orlovsky, and Orlovsky’s catatonic schizophrenic brother Julius. They are important documentary records of bohemian artist life in 1950s and ’60s New York; tender portraits of friends (Danny Seymour, the Chinese artist Sanyu, the newspaper delivery man in his rural second hometown of Mabou, Nova Scotia); painfully raw confrontations with the personal tragedies of his daughter’s accidental death and his son’s mental illness; diaristic travelogues; and thoughtful interrogations of the artist’s own divided loyalties between work and family.

Cocksucker Blues. 1972 

USA. Directed by Robert Frank 

Courtesy Promotour BV/ 

The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation/

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Robert Frank’s interest in the malleability of truth, in setting up conditions for improvisation within a scripted or premeditated framework, is perhaps best exemplified by his end-of-the-road movie Candy Mountain (1987), a collaboration with the novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, and his notorious Cocksucker Blues (1972). “After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin,” Jack Kerouac wrote in his introduction to Robert Frank’s landmark 1958 photographic essay The Americans. Nearly 15 years later, Robert Frank would use Super 8 camera stills from that same journey along Route 66 for the back cover of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., while also following the band on their promotional concert tour of the album—their first cross-country trip since Altamont, with Truman Capote, Terry Southern, Andy Warhol, and Princess Lee Radziwill as hangers on. Chronicling the loneliness and weary hedonism of life on the road—Robert Frank would later say, “This totally excludes the outside world. To never get out, to never know what city you are in…I cannot get used to it”—Cocksucker Blues was suppressed for years and seen only in bowdlerized, bootleg form. Don DeLillo, in his novel Underworld, would write of the film’s “washed blue light, a kind of crepuscular light, a tunnel light that suggested an unreliable reality.” 

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film. Thanks to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Peter Williamson, Laura Israel, and Nicholas Dawidoff.

Peggy Ahwesh @ Spike Island, Bristol - Vision Machines

Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines 

Spike Island, Bristol 

25 September 2021 - 16 January 2022 

PEGGY AHWESH

She Puppet (2001)

Digital video with sound, 15 mins. 

Courtesy the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York

Vision Machines is the first survey exhibition in the UK by American artist PEGGY AHWESH (b. 1954, Pennsylvania, USA). Curated in collaboration with London-based scholar Erika Balsom, the exhibition includes single-channel films and video installations made between 1993 and 2021.

Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority. Whether by working with nonprofessional performers, especially children, or by repurposing existing images – such as a decaying pornographic film, the video game Tomb Raider, or computer-animated news coverage – Peggy Ahwesh embraces improvisatory strategies that probe the critical potential of play. With keen attentiveness to the materiality of bodies and media technologies alike, her works articulate a feminist commitment to the marginal and the minor.

Even as Peggy Ahwesh rejects the notion of style as authorial signature, her concerns with sexuality, subjectivity, and troubling the boundary between the animate and inanimate have remained constant across the decades. Focusing on a selection of works that explore the relationship between the body and the technologized image, the exhibition at Spike Island spans issues and ideas as diverse as gender, climate change and war.

A new paperback reader – the first monographic publication on Peggy Ahwesh’s work to date – accompanies the show. Presenting an overview of the artist’s practice from the 1980s to the present day, the book is designed by Mike Gallagher and features newly commissioned essays by film scholars Erika Balsom and Elena Gorfinkel, writer Tendai Mutambu, novelist Shola von Reinhold, and an interview between Peggy Ahwesh and academic John David Rhodes.

PEGGY AHWESH

Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. Born in 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, she received her B.F.A. at Antioch College, Ohio. Retrospective exhibitions include: Girls Beware!, Whitney Museum of American Art (1997); Filmmuseum, Brussels; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Peggy’s Playhouse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; others. Screenings: Whitney Biennial (1991, 1995, 2002); New York Film Festival (1998, 2007); Flaherty Film Seminar (2003); Pompidou Center (2002, 2004); Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2017). Festivals include: Berlin; London; Cairo; Toronto; Rotterdam; and Creteil, France. Certain Women (codirected with Bobby Abate) was an official selection at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the opening night film at the New York Underground Film Festival (2004). Other films include Martina’s Playhouse, The Deadman (codirected with Keith Sanborn), Strange Weather, and Nocturne, all in Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. She has received grants from Jerome and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, Alpert Award in the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Art Matters. She teaches Film and Electronic Art at Bard College, New York.

ERIKA BALSOM

Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea and the co-editor of the anthology Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 (2019). She is also the author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017) and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013), and the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016). In 2017, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Sight and Sound, and in 2017 was the international curator in residence at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Zealand. In 2019, together with the artist Eric Baudelaire, she was awarded an UNDO fellowship from Union Docs. She is currently writing a short book about James Benning’s film TEN SKIES.

SPIKE ISLAND

133 Cumberland Road, Bristol BS1 6UX

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Garrett Bradley @ MoMA, New York

Projects: Garrett Bradley

MoMA, New York

Through March 21, 2021

GARRETT BRADLEY

America, 2019

Dir. Garrett Bradley

Courtesy the filmmaker

GARRETT BRADLEY

America, 2019

Dir. Garrett Bradley

Courtesy the filmmaker

The Museum of Modern Art presents Projects: Garrett Bradley, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, in the Museum’s street-level galleries. This exhibition, presented as part of a multiyear partnership between The Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, features a multichannel video installation, America (2019), a work organized around 12 short black-and-white films shot by Garrett Bradley and set to a score by Trevor Mathison and Udit Duseja. Among her original short vignettes, Garrett Bradley intersperses footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, an unreleased 1914 film believed to be the oldest surviving feature-length film with an all-Black cast. With America, Garrett Bradley imagines and pictures Black figures whose lives have been lost to history. Projects: Garrett Bradley is organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, the Studio Museum in Harlem, with Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, the Studio Museum in Harlem.

GARRETT BRADLEY

America, 2019

Dir. Garrett Bradley

Courtesy the filmmaker

The Library of Congress has estimated that 70 percent of the feature-length films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 have been lost. It is in these years that Garrett Bradley’s America finds its footing. Her evocative vignettes cite historical events, ranging from African American classical composer and baritone singer Harry T. Burleigh’s publication of the iconic spiritual “Deep River” in 1917, to the murder of popular jazz bandleader James Reese Europe in 1919, to the founding of baseball’s Negro National League (NNL) in 1920, and more. By including borrowed footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, Bradley also shines light on the history of a film radically progressive for its time. Lime Kiln Club Field Day evokes Black intimacy and a convivial sharing of space that celebrates Black vernacular movement and expression. This film had never been seen publicly until 2014, after it was rediscovered and restored by MoMA. By revisiting the recovery of this lost work and by giving lost stories visual life, Garrett Bradley considers how film impacts our ability to imagine history’s relationship to contemporary life. Garrett Bradley has said of her work, “I see America as a template for how visual storytelling and the assembly of images can serve as an archive of the past and a document of the present.”

Garrett Bradley’s Projects exhibition occurs in New York at a time when the status of early-20thcentury racial representations has become a matter of discussion and debate. As a multichannel installation, Garrett Bradley’s America constructs a physical space of invention in which turn-of-the-20th-century Black people and their ordinary lives are made present in ways that exceed the confines of what is available in an official archive.

GARRETT BRADLEY

America, 2019

Dir. Garrett Bradley

Courtesy the filmmaker

GARRETT BRADLEY BIOGRAPHY

Garrett Bradley (born 1986) is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in New York City. Working across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking, Garrett Bradley’s work addresses themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, Southern culture, and the history of film in the US. Her collaborative, research-based approach to filmmaking is often inspired by the real-life stories of her subjects. For Garrett Bradley, this research takes multiple forms—deep dives into historical archives, in-depth dialogues prompted by Craigslist want-ads, or an extended engagement with the communities and individuals she seeks to represent—and results in works that combine both scripted and improvisatory scenes. Garrett Bradley’s films explore the space between fact and fiction, embracing modes of working and of representing history that blur the boundaries between traditional notions of narrative and documentary cinema.

Garrett Bradley received her MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA from Smith College. Her short films and feature-length projects have been exhibited internationally at museums and festivals including the New Orleans Museum of Art; Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; Tribeca Film Festival, New York; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands; and SXSW, Austin, Texas; among many others. In 2020 Garrett Bradley became the first African American woman to win the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and she has received numerous awards and honors, including a 2019–20 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the 2017 Sundance Jury Prize for her short film Alone, which was released by the New York Times OpDocs and became an Oscar contender for short nonfiction filmmaking, included in Academy Shortlist. Garrett Bradley was second unit director on Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, and in December 2019 she opened her first museum solo exhibition, Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, curated by Rebecca Matalon.

MoMA - MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

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Simon Henwood, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Simon Henwood

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

October 4, 2000 - January 7, 2001

British artist and filmmaker Simon Henwood will exhibit a new 3-D computer-animated video entitled "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" in the Museum's Lobby gallery. Henwood's paintings and mixed-media works explore the complex social and cultural terrain of childhood. "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" tells the story of a pumpkin-headed boy whose extreme sensitivity to UV light forces him to remain indoors during the daytime. The exhibition will also re-create a portion of Henwood's studio and will include preliminary sketches for his cartoon as well as gouache paintings of adolescent children. Henwood began his career as a writer and illustrator of children's books. He is the founder of the 'zine, Purr, which features the work of internationally-known artists, writers, and filmmakers; and Alice, an ongoing journal exploring the representation and recycling of childhood in the arts, media, and culture. "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" is currently in development as a series for SKY TV, the Fox TV network's sister station in the UK.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu