Fort Worth Contemporary Arts

Yuri’s Office

September 10 – October 31, 2010



The Meadows Museum

Spanish Muse: A Contemporary Response, including “89 Seconds at Alcazar”

September 12, 2010 - Dec. 12, 2010



The Modern Art Museum Fort Worth

Screening of whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller w/ Q&A

September 14, 2010


Fort Worth and Dallas, TX
2010

Fort Worth Contemporary Arts
Yuri’s Office
September 10 – October 31, 2010
Curated by Christina Rees and Noah Simblist

Originally exhibited at Winkelman Gallery in New York in June 2009. This exhibition includes a life-sized replica of the office of Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut as well as videos and a photo text piece. This is part of a larger work in progress, White on White – a 60’s era cinema verité thriller, inspired by Goddard’s Alphaville - that moves from Moscow to the Caspian. The starting point of this exhibition was Malevich’s painting White on White, beginning a chain of failed utopias including modernist abstraction, the Soviet Union, and the space race.

This painstaking physical recreation of early cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s modest office space is gallery installation as film or television set, complete with artificial daylight source streaming through the window, ink-jetted oriental rug, sculpted telephones, raised platform floor and invisible fourth wall. While traveling and filming in Russia, Sussman snapped a clear-eyed photo of the roped-off tourist site, and then back at home forced herself through the problem-solving steps of reclaiming the communist Gagarin’s environment to her purpose of finding new meanings through the exploration of the overlooked, the back story, the time lags and anticipation of the bigger, myth-making event.

Gagarin—diminutive, good-natured, and ever-loyal to the Soviet Union—was the first man in space, the first to orbit the earth, and subsequently a massive hero in his homeland, having towns and streets named in his honor and national currency stamped with his likeness. He was a direct symbol of the competition for technological dominance between the USSR and the USA. We, the viewer, recognize his office as a small, tidy and somewhat drab time capsule of sorts—an aesthetic strongly associated with Soviet bureaucracy—and yet we search for clues to the man and his notorious country in this room’s confines and textures and surfaces, and also project ourselves upon the room with the enthusiasm of both psychoanalyst and patient. With Yuri’s Office, Sussman and Rufus continue their way with recontextualization, of making us reconsider what we think we already understand about the world, its events, its myths, and ourselves.

The Meadows Museum
Spanish Muse: A Contemporary Response, including “89 Seconds at Alcazar”
September 12, 2010 - Dec. 12, 2010

The Meadows Museum participated in a three-year loan program with the Prado Museum in Madrid. The first loan (that of El Greco’s Pentecost) will be exhibited from September 12, 2010 to January 16, 2011. In order to celebrate this loan program the Meadows Museum organized an exhibition of works by contemporary artists inspired by the Prado including Sussman’s “89 Seconds to Alcazar” – a single channel looped video inspired by the Prado’s Diego Velasquez painting Las Meninas. Other artists included in this exhibition included José Manuel Ballester, Claudio Bravo, Jake and Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Thomas Struth, and Manolo Valdés.

In conjunction with the exhibition Eve Sussman gave a lecture at the Meadows Museum on Sept 15 and conducted a seminar with SMU students that afternoon.

Modern Art Museum Fort Worth
Screening of whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller w/ Q&A
September 14, 2010

This screening follows its theatrical premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The film will be powered by code, programmed exclusively for the project, that edits the film in real time culling from a server loaded with over 2,000 film clips, sounds, and narration. The guided nature of the code causes it to pull video and audio, based on voice over and tags written into the metadata of each file and the narrative. The movie mixes chronology, intertwining beginning, middle or end, never repeating the same way twice.

Eve Sussman is an artist whose work incorporates film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. In 2003 she began working under the rubric, Rufus Corporation. Rufus has evolved into a 'think tank' of performers, artists, musicians, writers and programmers who have collaborated on films and art works. Under the direction of Sussman, the company has created 89 seconds at Alcázar, The Rape of the Sabine Women, Yuri's Office and whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller, an experimental film noir (currently in progress).

Eve Sussman/RufusCorporation's projects have been supported by Haupstadtkulturfonds, Berlin; Creative Capital; New York State Council on the Arts; The Trust for Mutual Understanding and The Guggenheim Foundation among others. Her work has shown internationally, including exhibitions at The Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Louisiana Museum in Denmark and The National Gallery in London.