“Rooms Look Back”

Departing from art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s remarks concerning the perception of space and emotional memory (“What we see looks back on us,” he’s noted), this elegantly installed group show reflects on physical and mental spaces via the medium of film and the reoccurring motif of the mirror. When one of the solemn actors in Ursula Mayer’s black-and-white 16-mm film Memories of Mirrors/Dramatic Personalities After Mary Wigman and Madam d’Ora, 2007/2008, holds up a mirror to the viewer, it accurately reflects the medium itself, as the light of the camera flashes toward us to make a connection between the past and the present. In Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Lunch in Fur), 2008, viewers witness a fictional meeting of artist Meret Oppenheim, photographer Dora Maar, and dancer Josephine Baker in a modernist living room that seems haunted by memories of the avant-garde: Picasso’s portrait of Maar weeping, Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup, a chessboard of Surrealist forms, and a tape recorder, all present on the set, become figures in an enigmatic play, while the protagonists talk about the nature of memory.

The four-channel video installation 4 Rooms (East New Orleans), 2008, by Margaret Salmon, is an intimate portrait of an African-American family that relocated after Hurricane Katrina. While the camera follows the movements of the inhabitants in their shabby surroundings and daily routines, one gets the sense that the routines haven’t arrived quite yet at normality. In another room, which hosts four works by Rosa Barba, the accumulated chatter of four film projectors permeates the space. Meanwhile, in Barba’s film installation They Shine, 2007/2008, a gathering of huge mirrored solar panels turns in California’s Mojave Desert—the location of countless Hollywood productions and military tests—while a voice-over describes an ominous city, apparently hidden by a power plant. Additionally, three temporary “inserts” by Davide Cascio, Swantje Hielscher and Manuela Leinhoß, placed one after another in the space, seem like prismatic refractions of the show’s title.