Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Manon de Boer Resonating Surfaces—A Trilogy, on view February 10, 2013.
Manon de Boer, Think about Wood, Think about Metal, 2011. Film still. Courtesy of the artist and Jan Mot Brussels-Mexico City.
Resonating Surfaces – A Trilogy presents for the first time in a museum exhibition a series of three cinematic portraits defined by narratives of time and memory, and structured around the relationship between images and sounds. Created over a period of ten years by the contemporary Dutch artist and filmmaker Manon de Boer, the films feature personal introspective narratives focused on the transformative experiences of life in the seventies, a time when each of the protagonists struggled to define their identities. The women featured are the late Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel, who played the lead role in the French cult classic film Emmanuelle; Suely Rolnik, a Brazilian psychoanalyst and thinker; and American Robyn Schulkowsky, who emerged during this time as a celebrated avant-garde percussionist. In allowing the voices of the three women to be the sole focus of the narrative thread, the films generate a dissonant sensorial experience in which recollection is not intended to recreate the past but rather to frame the present, and where abstract notions such as memory, history and life are negotiated through the cinematic experience.
Sylvia Kristel – Paris is a portrait of actress Sylvia Kristel, best known for her role in the 1970s erotic cult classic Emmanuelle. The city of Paris is featured prominently, as it serves as a background to her reminiscing about acting and her turbulent love life during that decade. De Boer recorded Kristel’s stories twice between November 2000 and June 2002, and presents these accounts in nonchronological order, emphasizing the mutability of memory and the impossibility of distilling the past into a cohesive biography.
Resonating Surfaces is a portrait, of a city, of a woman and of a certain philosophy of life as it situates Suely Rolnik in the context of the sounds, smells, and color of São Paulo—her native city, as well as the intellectual atmosphere of 1970s Paris—the city of her exile. In the narrative, Rolnik delves into a personal history of alternative lifestyle, imprisonment, psychoanalytic work, and her relationships with the two founders of schizoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose work focused on the role of social behavior in understanding personality. The film is woven through by different themes pertaining to Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, among them the relation to otherness, the connection between body and power, as well as the politics of desire and of resistance.
In Think about Wood, Think about Metal, fragments of the life and thinking of percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky are situated in the history of the avant-garde music during and after the 1970s. Schulkowsky has worked with composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff. One of the few female percussionists, Schulkowsky frequently uses found objects in her unique percussion improvisations, which occupy a large part of the film, as their rhythm complements the nonlinear structuring of time central to this body of work.
Manon de Boer: Resonating Surfaces—A Trilogy is part of the ongoing “Live Cinema” series at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which explores video and film work in contemporary art. Presented in the Julien Levy Gallery of the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, the trilogy will be rotating on a weekly schedule beginning November 17. In addition to the weekly screenings, the exhibition offers an interpretative space, Live Cinema/In Context, where visitors can learn more about the lives and work of these extraordinary women.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Julien Levy Gallery
2525 Pennsylvania Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19130
www.philamuseum.org
