Friday, September 10, 2010 to Friday, October 22, 2010
Duet is a two person exhibition at the Forest City Gallery feauturing the work of Andrew Forster & William Basinski in conjunction with LOLA fest.http://www.lolafest.com
Distintigration Loop 1.1: Known for his melancholic brand of drone music, Basinski offers in this film a rare opportunity: to watch the 9/11 events from a different perspective than the one presented and repeated ad nauseam by the media. An immobile camera captures a dark cloud of smoke covering the city as dusk breaks in and gives in to the first post-9/11 night, supported by the slow evolution of Basinki's dronescapes. Basinski describes the musical piece, composed from materials recorded in 1982, as a fragment of "American pastoralia, lost youth, and paradise lost". As day progresses, the melancholic tone of these carefully integrated loops is gradually swept over by grimmer colors, eventually leaving the landscape with an almost emotionally neutral resonance - perhaps a reflection of the unfolding of "lost youth". Even more dramatic and grotesque events would follow that day, as it is known, but its media-oriented nature and symbolic richness makes it the most important episode in modern history since the (alleged) landing on the moon. Many films explored the potential of the 9/11 event, with different degrees of success, but certainly none as haunting and beautiful as this one.
Duet is a video projection documenting a choreography in which a performer echoes the movements of Hassam Abdo, a young Palestinian boy stopped at an Israeli army checkpoint with a bomb attached to his body. In this performative echo, a man enacts and repeats the gestures of the boy while a second performer, a woman, embodies all that intervenes from behind the plane of the camera; the soldiers, the viewer, and the camera itself.