Nationalgalerie: A Collection for the 21st Century
16.06.2023
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
June 16th, 2023 until further notice
Psychostasia – A film by Holly Zausner
April 20 – June 29, 2022 | 10:00 – 19:00
Palazzo Michiel dal Brusa, Strada Nova, 4391
30121 Campo Santi Apostoli, Venezia VE, Italy
Psychostasia will be extended until June 29th, 2022 at Palazzo Michiel dal Brusa’ in Venice
Holly Zausner is pleased to invite you to the premiere of Psychostasia, the artist’s most recent film that follows a woman on her search for answers to universal questions about the human condition, through emotionally-charged interactions with the art and architecture of Venice. Psychostasia will premiere at the Palazzo Michiel dal Brusa from April 20 – May 15, 10:00 – 19:00.
The film, shot entirely on location in Venice, opens with the protagonist (played by Zausner) attempting to navigate her way through a large maze in search of a way out. The visual metaphor of a labyrinth serves as the guiding principle of the film – exploring meaning within our life choices and confronting ideas of mortality – taking her through a series of interior and exterior spaces in Venice and tracing a mazelike path that takes her deeper and deeper into the complex cultural history of the city.
In her quest for answers, the character passes through many sites in Venice, including the Galleria Franchetti, the Scola di San Rocco, the Palazzo Grimani, the St. Michelle island cemetery, and the Venetian School of Music. On her journey she encounters lavish spaces housing the sculptures and paintings of Tintoretto, crosses the Grand Lagoon in a rowing boat at dawn towards St. Michelle Island (the cemetery island of Venice), and in the final scene, observes the details of a 13th century Byzantine mosaic depicting the Last Judgement.
Psychostasia, which refers to the soul being weighed by a divine authority in an act of judgment, is a concept that can be found in religions throughout the world, including Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Christianity, this weighing of the soul appears most often in the well-known form of the Last Judgment, which was an especially popular subject of medieval and Renaissance European art. Rather than investigating the human condition through the lens of religion, Zausner’s film asks us to consider how the humanistic traditions of the arts, as embodied in the cultural history of Venice, serve to guide as in this never-ending set of questions about human life. Zausner has shown internationally at Neue National Galerie, Hamburger Bahnhof Gegenwurt, Bode-Museum, KW, Singapore Art Museum, Brandts Klaede Fabrik, Herbert Johnson Museum, Moore Museum of Art and Design, Syracuse Art Museum, etc.
Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories
November 28th 2021, to July 3rd, 2022
Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories at Hamburger Bahnhof addresses art’s relationship to political protest, historical trauma and social narratives from the 19th century to the present. At a time when icebergs are melting faster than societies are reacting to this new reality, and the end of the world is more conceivable than the end of capitalism, the exhibition considers the climate and environment not only from an ecological standpoint but also from a social one.
The Gift: Collecting Entanglements
August 20th 2021, to November 11th, 2021
Singapore Art Museum
Seen & Heard: An Active Commemoration of the Suffrage Movement
Opening June 10, 2017
Curated by DJ Hellerman
For more information visit https://www.everson.org/explore/upcoming-exhibitions/seen-and-heard
The exhibition’s title and concept were inspired by Barbara Kruger’s “Who Speaks, Who is Silent” from the Everson’s permanent collection, a monumental work addressing the implication of silence and representation for women. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the passage of women’s suffrage in New York in 1917, “Seen and Heard” will explore the state’s activist history and its contemporary application. The exhibition will include permanent collection works along with new commissions and recently created work.
Double Feature, Holly Zausner and Chris Marker
March 26, 2018, 7:30
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfort, Germany
Double Feature, Holly Zausner, Unsettled Matter and Chris Marker, La Jettee.
For more information visit http://www.schirn.de/en/program/offerings/double_feature/#holly-zausner
“Naked City: Holly Zausner at Postmasters” in Artcritical
The subject of Holly Zausner’s 2015 film Unsettled Matter is the artist herself, but just as clearly, it is us, the viewers. It is a cyclical film, which variously embraces and casts off narrative, almost on a whim. Zausner passes through New York as a ghost — purposefully marching through empty streets, lobbies and stations, sometimes no more than a flicker, but just as often stopping to contemplate: a book in the basement of the Strand, the mangled visage of Queen Hatshepsut at the Metropolitan Museum, or us, the viewer, at the center of the swirling maelstrom of Times Square (the only time in which we see other human beings). Though she interacts with no one, she is performing for us, right up until the possible endpoint of the film, when she comes physically crashing down onto her workbench strewn with stills from her last work — death by art.
We cannot tell if the most spectacular special effect of Unsettled Matter is in fact the end of the artist. In Unseen (2007), her previous film, set in Berlin, her silent antagonist is a larger-than–life-sized rubber doll. This feminine and sculptural figure has appeared as a prop in many of Zausner’s works over the years. It is burdensome and seems to provoke danger wherever the artist goes: in Unseen she is watched by a tiger and threatened by a nearby explosion. Unsettled Matter is more foreboding as the enemy is ever-present, and we get the inkling that it is somehow contained within our own act of spectation. Besides a sense of determination in her demeanor and gait, Zausner’s primary emotion seems to be impatience and weariness. At one point the artist, wearing sunglasses indoors, drinks a pint and takes a brief respite from her perambulations — giving us a moment to breathe as well.
If this film has a beginning or an end, it is a tale of escape and alienation, and of the artist’s lonely practice, which, it would seem, always ends badly — the tense lines that support, very literally, this floating life, can give away at any moment. But such a linear narrative to Unsettled Matter is a bit too easy, and Zausner inlays the very simple activities of the film — walking and looking — with a few brief supernatural gestures that lead us to understand that we may disbelieve our eyes at any moment — this is the stuff of metaphor. The mystical details also become more apparent after watching the piece again, when we are half-expecting them and the suspense is much stronger. This is another indication that there is a rhythmic and endless cycle at play. Zausner briefly communes with the pharaoh Hatshepsut, then while admiring a tomb in the Metropolitan Museum, she departs, leaving her reflection standing there a few seconds too long. Similarly weird is a passage in the Strand, in which all the titles are inverted — a mirror of a mirror. Zausner also moves in slow-mo and speeds up until she becomes a blur. Despite these visual sleights-of-hand, the superb sound always keeps us aware of her steps, clack-clacking on the pavement.
Unsettled Matter seems most likely to be a dream, and a rejection of time. Unlike Unseen, which was decidedly tragic — the artist weighed down by her life, her choice, her femininity and her art — here she eludes us, traipsing through memories of past and future alike. She flits and stomps through the city, which is all hers, coldly regards the hysterical Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, and moves on, and keeps us a sympathetic but bewildered spectator, hustling to keep up.
– William Corwin
http://www.artcritical.com/2015/05/27/william-corwin-on-holly-zausner/
“Unsettled Matter” at Postmasters
Opening April 25th, 5:30pm to 8pm
This show is open from April 25th to May 31st, 2015
For more information visit http://www.postmastersart.com
Postmasters is pleased to present a new film and a group of photographs by Holly Zausner. This will be her second exhibition with the gallery.
In the opening scene of Unsettled Matter, Holly Zausner’s 10 1/2 minute cinematically projected HD video, the artist is suspended in a harness, like a sculpture, above one of her collages, which incorporates hundreds of photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s sculpture garden in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Suddenly, Zausner falls from midair, destroying the artwork and losing consciousness — maybe even dying.
Suspended between reality and dreamscape, Zausner is then seen wandering through an utterly deserted New York City, a city defined by its teaming millions. Zausner employs the Hollywood trope of making a metropolis look abandoned, no cars, no people – just the artist, filmed in real time, nothing digitally altered. Her presence in the landscape magnifies the inconceivable surrounding emptiness. Like Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, his seminal science fiction film, Zausner explores the interplay between illusion and identity.
We follow Zausner as she explores the newly defined city by visiting key sites of New York, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art , Grand Central Station, lower Broadway, Film Forum, Chinatown, Washington Square Park, The Strand Book Store, Old Towne Bar and Bergdorf Goodman’s. Zausner’s movement through these spaces begins to reveal itself as a meditation and commentary on contemporary alienation. Best example of this, one that furthers the sense of distance and disconnection, is Zausner visiting an empty theatre at Film Forum, which is screening Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the iconic film about isolation. This is the only instance where another human being appears in Unsettled Matter.
Invoking the traditionally male character of film noir, Zausner walks confidently through the streets of her abandoned city, simultaneously reversing the standard gender roles of such work and re-defining the female character.
Viewed on the loop, Unsettled Matter challenges the sequential cannon. The emptiness of the city becomes more and more ominous – only to return to the studio, with the artist suspended and falling again, traversing the vacant city yet again. The viewer is left wondering – disaster, metaphor, journey, or a dream?
Lisa Paul Streitfeld has written an article about Holly Zausner’s new film “Unsettled Matter.”
Visit the Huffington Post to read the full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-paul-streitfeld/revolution-as-ubermensch-_b_6785928.html