We are very pleased to invite you to the eleventh session of Kinu will be dedicated to the American artist Jeanne Liotta (New York, 1960). Her collages, performances and experimental films focus on scientific themes, which she approaches through observation, recording, recreation and the editing of phenomena that are perceptible to the naked eye. Using an approach close to that of natural philosophy, which is dedicated to the study of nature and the physical universe prior to the emergence of modern science, Jeanne works mainly with analogue media, including 16mm film, whether original or found, to address universal themes on the basis of everyday perceptual situations. As part of the Kinu#11 session on Wednesday 25 October at 19:30 at Atoi, Jeanne will present the projector performance Path of Totality, in reference to the trajectory of the moon's shadow on the surface of the earth during a total solar eclipse.
Path of Totality (2019) 25/10/2023 Atoi - 19:30 Projector performance with soundtrack by Eric Baus, Phil Cordelli, and Oren Silverman. 30 min. approx. In August 2017, during "The Great American Eclipse", the width of the shadow as it passed over the USA was only 70 miles, a narrow strip of lunar shadow traveling at over 1600 km per second. Path of Totality is a projector performance in which Jeanne uses a handmade 16 mm film loop, lenses she creates, various concrete as well as transparent objects and shadow plays. This way, out of distrust of photography's ability to represent the ineffable light of the eclipse, the artist substitutes sunlight for the artificial light of the projection system in her own "staging" of the event, bringing the cosmic to the confines of Atoi's black box. The performance plays with light latency, peripheral vision, and the cosmic imagination using simple objects, the same way in which the relationship between the sun and the earth is often illustrated with a torch and an orange. We have asked Leire Lacunza to write Distirak#11. Leire's artistic practice has dealt with the phenomenological quality of light as well as that of its negative, the shadow.
During the Lantaldea session with Jeanne Liotta we will produce a 16mm film using the sculptures of the city of Bilbao and frottage. It will take place in Atoi on Saturday 28 October. If you wish to be part of Lantaldea, write an email to [email protected]
Jeanne Liotta makes films, moving image installations, and projector and other lens-based media performances. Throughout her long artistic career she has also worked in collaboration with artist Bradley Eros and the expanded film group Optipus. Her 16mm film about the night skies, Observando El Cielo, won numerous awards, including the prestigious Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and was voted among the ten best films of the decade by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Her work has been seen at the Whitney Museum of Art, the New York Film Festival, SFMOMA, the CCCB, the Centre George Pompidou, the Cinematheque Française, the Nitsch Museum in Naples (Italy), the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, MoMA, the Vienna Film Museum, and Harvard and Duke Universities, among others. Liotta teaches graduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Bard MFA program in New York. Her films are distributed by Lightcone (Paris), and her work is represented by Microscope Gallery (NYC), where she has had two solo exhibitions, Break the Sky (2018) and The World is a Picture of theWorld (2021).