Nashashibi / Skaer
“Pygmalion”
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Exhibition September 21 - December 14 2008
bb5 2008, Neue Nationalgalerie
April 5 – June 15 2008
Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have worked together on and off since 2005, alongside their individual art practices. Using their collaborative work to portray life and historical artworks in the process of transformation, they reveal a world in which familiar objects and behaviors betray an uncanny side. To date, they have made two films together: Ambassador (2004) and Flash in the Metropolitan (2006). In the latter, shot at night in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, they expose artifacts from Oceania, Africa, the Near East, the Greek and Roman eras, and Medieval Europe to a flashing strobe. Breaking through the darkness, the momentary flashes of light seem to liberate the objects from their moribund, museal existence and to reanimate them with their original magic.
Breathing soul and life into what is lifeless is the underlying thread in the two artists’ new project on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie. For the installation, the artist duo takes up the ancient myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, under whose hands the sculpture he was shaping gradually came to life. From that starting point, the artists incorporate a representation of a fragment of a sixth-century BC Attic plate by the painter Exekias that depicts a funeral procession of four persons and a horse-drawn carriage following a prominent woman to her grave. Playing with surfaces and planes, and the distance between originals and their reproductions, the artists depict one of the horse’s legs three-dimensionally in terracotta. Spread on the floor, is an enlarged reproduction of the same plate as a plexiglass mosaic. Crucial to the ensemble is a 16mm film made by the artists in the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence designed by Henri Matisse and showing a priest in front of a mirror changing into his chasuble, also designed by Matisse. In following this process, the film focuses on how the designed “artwork” becomes an object of daily use when worn by the priest. In Pygmalion, Nashashibi/Skaer combine and manipulate modern and antique artifacts, once designed for ceremonial or everyday use, reinvesting them with a sense of purpose and imbuing them with new meaning.
www.berlinbiennale.de
www.cacbretigny.com
Coproduction CAC Brétigny /
bb5, 5th Berlin Biennial For Contemporary Art
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