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Hirshhorn Museum opens Directions: Jeremy Deller

“Directions: Jeremy Deller,” on view Feb. 7 through Aug. 31 at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, features “English Magic” (2012), a 14-minute video that shares its title with the artist’s solo exhibition commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. According to Deller, this idiosyncratic collective portrait of Britishness proposes questions about how “consumerism, technology and the new monotony of work” have altered the experience of nature, culture and history. He has also described the single-channel work as an “esoteric, mystical pop video.”

Winner of the 2004 Turner Prize, Deller (British, b. London, 1966) is best known for elaborate artworks tapping into social issues and involving the participation of numerous “average, real” people. For “Acid Brass” (1997), he organized performances of acid-house tracks by a traditional brass band. The Hirshhorn’s 2008 exhibition “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, Part II: Realisms” included Deller’s masterwork, “The Battle of Orgreave” (2001), a reenactment of a 1984 conflict between police and striking miners.