LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects presents a group exhibition of video works by John Bock, Keren Cytter, Paul Pfeiffer, Gillian Wearing, and Akram Zaatari. This presentation marks the first time many of these works are being shown in Los Angeles.
John Bock's Dandy (2006) was filmed at the family home of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, the Chateau du Bosc. The video stars Monsieur Lautréamont, a character akin to Lautrec, who is willing to transgress traditional taste in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection. It is both period drama and surreal fantasy, featuring the artist as actor, and sculptural props resembling Bock's work outside of the moving-image medium. Bock was recently included in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale, and will have a major solo exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany (October 3 – January 12, 2014).
For Untitled (2009), artist Keren Cytter used both trained and untrained actors to shoot in front of a live audience at the Hebbel am Ufer theater in Berlin. Inspired by John Cassavetes's Opening Night (1977), the film follows a theater actress as she prepares to go on stage and is confronted by the constructed nature of identity and reality. Her backstage 'monologue' resonates with the nature of role-playing and the performance awaited by the audience on the screen. Untitled was last shown in Los Angeles during a one-person exhibition of Cytter's work at the Hammer Museum in 2010. In addition to making video-based works, Cytter has published numerous novels, screenplays, journals and poems, and is the founder of the dance and theater company Dance International Europe Now (D.I.E. NOW).
Paul Pfeiffer's Morning After the Deluge (2003) uses digital technology to create an illusion combining sunrise and sunset into a hypnotic projected image. The work takes its title from J. M. W. Turner's painting from 1843, Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, which depicts the dawn following the devastation of the biblical event. Both atmospheric and contemplative, Pfeiffer's film is a rumination on the passing of time while suspending it indefinitely. Pfeiffer is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes including the Bucksbaum Award given by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000) as well as the Alpert Award for Visual Arts (2009). His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York in 2010 and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas in 2012.
The brief but powerful Bully (2010) by Gillian Wearing features Method actors engaging in an improvisational exercise in which an incident from the protagonist's personal experience is reenacted. As the participants taunt and belittle the victim, painful memories emerge and emotions arise, blurring fact and fiction as roles and motivations become less clearly defined. Bully was cut from the 83-minute documentary feature Self Made (2010), which was funded by the UK Film Council, and will be presented for the first time in Los Angeles. Wearing recently had a retrospective organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, which traveled to K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany and Pinakothek der Moderne,
Munich, Germany and will have a solo exhibition at Regen Projects in the fall of 2014.
Akram Zaatari's The End of Time (2013) depicts a changing combination of two men enacting a cycle of seduction and indifference. Zaatari's work explores aspects of representation, identity, intimacy, and desire and is informed by research on vernacular Middle Eastern photography and the functions of the archive. One of the founders of the Arab Image Foundation, which aims to locate and preserve photos from Arabic communities around the world, Zaatari's work investigates how images and image-making affect notions of history and memory. Akram Zaatari represented Lebanon this year at the 55th Venice Biennale with Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) and is currently premiering in the United States two video installations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
