Over the past few decades, artists around the world have embraced the full possibilities of time-based media, creating remarkably polished and technically meticulous works. Beauty, theatricality and the use of large, often vast environments have been combined to produce powerful visual images, unexpected encounters and emotionally charged experiences.
This new exhibition, entitled A Moving Image, features the work of five contemporary artists of Israeli descent. Their innovative use of time-based media, film and video, has brought their work to world attention and international acclaim. The artists, Yael Bartana, Guy Ben-Ner, Omer Fast, Sigalit Landau and Nira Pereg, have been featured in prestigious art exhibitions and Biennales around the world, from Venice to Miami, but rarely has their work been presented in Canada. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to see work by these art world stars, in one location, and in Alberta.
Through narrative, documentary and poetic ways of storytelling, their work addresses political and social circumstances of the present day. Together, the works in this exhibition address themes related to the image of borders and boundaries—of things that separate and connect people—as well as the resonance of the past in contemporary events, and how experiences of conflict and attempts at resolution can be re-imagined and expressed by contemporary artists. Using humour, drama, enactment and parody, as well as incorporating inventive (or inspired) editing techniques and manipulated soundtracks, the artists provide critical new views of deeply complex, yet very real situations.
A Moving Image is produced by the Art Gallery of Alberta and the National Gallery of Canada as part of the National Gallery of Canada at the Art Gallery of Alberta exhibition series.
