MIAMI, FL.- MAC@MAM, the innovative partnership between Miami Art Museum and the pioneering contemporary arts organization, Miami Art Central, today announced its first full slate of exhibitions featuring the work of leading international artists working in new media.

The exhibitions are:
• Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: The Killing Machine and Other Stories
October 22, 2007 – January 20, 2008
• Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy
February 29 – June 29, 2008
• Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space
October 10, 2008 – January 18, 2009

Concurrently, MAM announced that Rina Carvajal, currently Executive Director and Chief Curator at MAC, has joined MAM's staff as Adjunct Curator. MAC@MAM is a unique collaboration between two major Miami cultural institutions. Merging MAC’s cutting-edge exhibitions program into MAM’s nationally recognized museum program, MAC@MAM provides an exciting new contemporary art resource in Miami’s thriving arts community. Conceived by MAC founder and MAM Trustee Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, together with leadership of the Miami Art Museum, MAC@MAM enhances and expands Miami Art Museum’s contemporary programs in anticipation of the museum’s move to a state-of-the-art new waterfront building designed by architects Herzog and de Meuron in 2010.

“The Miami arts community has expressed great interest in the future of MAC@MAM. I believe this outstanding schedule of exhibitions will more than meet their expectations,” said Terence Riley, director of Miami Art Museum. “We are thrilled to be able to present these breakthrough contemporary artists and works, and delighted to welcome Rina Carvajal to the Miami Art Museum team – her arrival ensures that MAC@MAM will continue to benefit from MAC’s distinct curatorial vision. This is such an exciting time for the Miami arts community, and the launch of MAC@MAM’s exhibition programs builds on the excitement generated by our new building at the center of the greater Museum Park project.”

“As the founder of MAC—and a member of MAM’s Board of Trustees—I am so pleased to bring these two great institutions together and see them benefiting from each other,” said Ella Fontanals-Cisneros. “The synergy of the MAC@MAM collaboration will help to lay MAM’s foundation as one of the nation's greatest art museums and, as today's programming announcement demonstrates, MAC is investing its efforts, its knowledge, and its vision toward that goal."

MAC@MAM Exhibitions: 2007-2008
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: The Killing Machine and Other Stories October 22, 2007 – January 20, 2008 - Opening on October 22 and on view during Art Basel Miami Beach 2007, MAC@MAM will present Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: The Killing Machine and Other Stories, at the Miami Art Museum’s downtown location and at Miami’s landmark Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Boulevard. Since the early 1990s, Janet Cardiff (b. 1957, Canada) and George Bures Miller (b. 1960, Canada) have collaborated on a series of groundbreaking works using recorded sounds as their source material and subject. The resulting installations create an audio-visual collage of fleeting experiences and dislocated audio effects that subtly disorient and challenge the viewer.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: The Killing Machine and Other Stories presents ten installations that weave together live theatrical experience with film, creating a new narrative genre. Through words and audio, Cardiff and Miller's installations suggest script transporting the viewer into a world of simultaneous fictional stories. The exhibition was organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Institut Mathildenhöhen Darmstadt and curated by Bartomeu Marí and Ralf Beil.

Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy
February 29 – June 29, 2008
Miami Art Museum
English artist Melanie Smith moved to Mexico City in 1989. Life in the world’s third largest city has had a profound effect on her work, which reflects the city’s tensions and intrinsic contradictions. Trained as a painter, Smith’s work also encompasses drawing, photography, installation, and video. Colors, textures, materials and found objects from the urban environment figure prominently in her work, which examines the visual elements of the twenty-first century city in all of its complexity and chaos. Smith developed the three-part film series the Parres trilogy in 2004 and 2005 with Rafael Ortega. Shot in the small town of Parres on the outskirts of Mexico City, the films investigate ways of seeing – each by capturing a scene that is either hidden or uncovered by a “painting.” In Parres I, a man walks toward the camera, picks up a can of spray paint and gradually coats the screen, obscuring the scene in the background. Parres II moves from a closeup shot of a woman’s blinking eye to a scene that is gradually bleached out by a heavy downpour of rain. In Parres III the film moves in reverse order–a muted gray painted screen is slowly wiped away by a window cleaner to reveal the noise and activity of the street. Together, the Parres Trilogy reflects the artist’s focus on the city—the defining setting of contemporary life—and our shared attempts to make sense of the world around us.

Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space
October 10, 2008 – January 18, 2009
Miami Art Museum
During Art Basel Miami Beach 2008, MAC@MAM will present the work of renowned filmmaker and video artist Chantal Akerman (b. 1950, Belgium). Jointly organized by MAC@MAM, the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, the List Center for the Arts at MIT, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space is the first major traveling exhibition of Akerman’s work in the U.S. A filmmaker of extraordinary range and uncompromising vision, Akerman has made more than 25 films in her 30-year career. Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space will feature four multi-media video installations from her documentary series: D'Est (From the East), Sud, From the Other Side, Là-Bas, as well as a new work created for the exhibition. D’Est (1993) retraces a journey from late summer to the depths of winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics to Moscow, in a compendium of striking images of Eastern Europe and its citizens in transition. From the Other Side (1999) is an unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants attempting the dangerous crossing from Mexico to Arizona. Sud (1999), inspired by Akerman’s love for the work of the southern writers William Faulkner and James Baldwin, quickly shifts from an elegant meditation on the South to a passionate documentary about the tumultuous aftermath of the murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Là-Bas is a rare self-reflective piece on Akerman’s Jewish heritage filmed almost entirely in her apartment in Tel Aviv.

Rina Carvajal - Rina Carvajal established MAC as a leading institution for contemporary art and culture in Miami and internationally. Prior to joining MAC, Carvajal was the director of the Mason Gross Art Galleries at Rutgers University, adjunct curator for the 1998 XXIV São Paulo Biennial, and Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from 1997–2000. Carvajal served as curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, and as deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela. She is the author of numerous essays and exhibition catalogues on international contemporary art. Carvajal received her Bachelors and Masters of Fine Arts degrees from New York University.