ROME.- More than a multimedia installation, Douglas Gordon: Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now’ish… is an encyclopaedic vision of Douglas Gordon’s (born Glasgow, 1966) video works, on view from 30 May in Gallery 5, MAXXI’s most iconic exhibition space.

Video installations, films, photographs, soundtracks, texts, and neon words are interwoven into a layered narrative, in which each work opens a door to the heart of universal themes – identity in constant transformation, mental and physical states, personal and collective memory, and the irreconcilable tension between opposites. The National Museum of 21st Century Arts presents Gordon’s filmic oeuvre in a sculptural form that encompasses every work created from 1992 to the present day. In 1999, when invited to exhibit at Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, Douglas Gordon chose to present the full corpus of his video works up to that point. The exhibition, titled Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now. To be seen on monitors, some with headphones, others run silently and all simultaneously, was conceived as an exploration of the concept of the archive. A complex device in which heterogeneous works connect through a continuous visual and conceptual flow.

This gave rise to the eponymous installation, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now, which has since been presented in various exhibition contexts, continuously updated and expanded to include Gordon’s most recent works. Today, the installation is part of the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Douglas Gordon’s works emerge from the reinterpretation and manipulation of a diverse range of visual materials. Iconic and forgotten films, historical and scientific documentaries, television series and amateur videos. Through these fragments of contemporary visual culture, the artist evokes a profound sense of estrangement, moving between repetition, identity, and what Freud called the “uncanny”. Gordon treats the cinematic archive as a readymade: he extracts, fragments, decontextualises, and reimagines it – giving rise to new, original visions. Moving images thus become a medium of unlimited potential, capable of questioning the very structures of social communication, language, perception, and collective memory.

By employing strategies such as sampling, repetition, deceleration, division, mirroring, and desynchronization, Gordon deconstructs the viewer’s expectations, only to reassemble them in a new dimension, often ambiguous and unsettling. Imagination, knowledge, and common sense are fractured and repositioned within a visual universe charged with subtle tensions and emotional resonance, engaging and provoking audiences everywhere.

Emanuela Bruni, President Fondazione MAXXI: “With this major monographic exhibition dedicated to Douglas Gordon, MAXXI confirms itself as a vibrant space where the most radical and international artistic practices find a home. Exhibiting a world-renowned artist like Gordon, with a project spanning over thirty years of visual research, means offering the public an immersive experience capable of questioning memory, identity, and perception. In the spaces designed by Zaha Hadid, his works transform into a powerful visual narrative that transcends the boundaries of language and time. It is an opportunity to reaffirm MAXXI’s mission to tell the present through the most innovative and significant expressions of contemporary art”.

Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now’ish takes shape as a continuous remix, reworked and reassembled by the artist with each new presentation. Rather than following a chronological sequence or a predetermined order, the work is shaped by the artist’s sensibility, a precise aesthetic inquiry, and the specific exhibition context.

Within the striking setting of Gallery 5—suspended in mid-air and framed by large windows that open onto the city—Douglas Gordon’s work reveals itself in its characteristic multiplicity of languages, allowing visitors a free, non-hierarchical experience of his creations.

The 114 films and videos on display include iconic works such as 24 Hour Psycho (1993), the groundbreaking video installation that secured the artist’s international acclaim: Alfred Hitchcock’s classic is slowed down to span a full day, challenging viewers’ perceptions of narrative, suspense, and duration. Other highlights include Play Dead; Real Time (2003), The End of Civilisation (2012), the three-channel work Silence, Exile, Deceit: an industrial pantomime (2013), Citizens of Palermo! (2016), I Had Nowhere to Go (2016), and one of his most recent pieces, 2023EastWestGirlsBoys (2023).