“Apparently he had examined them patiently picture by picture and imagined that they would be screened in the same way, failing at that time to grasp the principle of the cinematograph.”
—Flann O’Brien
About The Movement-Image
The Movement-Image is an exhibition and performance series curated by Lecturer in Visual Arts Colleen Asper. It unspools the motion picture to situate performance in a continuum with film.
In Performing Remains, Rebecca Schneider describes the ways in which media studies, “conflates the invention of the still with the invention of the camera, too often forgetting the long history of precedent living stills.” The Movement-Image likewise sees across disciplinary divides to a long history of movement. The six artists presented in the exhibition understand the living body as a force of continuous invention.
Featured Artists
Will Rawls’s regular degular weaves the still into a moving image by making a stop-motion film of a living performer as she visits four locations found on each corner of the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and Interstate 44, while Amy Beecher’s Holding Lead introduces movement to the photograph by filming the artist’s increasingly quavering hand being positioned and lit while holding a rose. Leila Weefur nods to the use of music in silent films by scoring their Blackberry Pastorale: Symphony No. 1 with Fantasie Negre, a composition by Florence Beatrice Price—the first Black woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer. Weefur’s lecture performance on 10/24 will merge cinema, embodiment, and the symbiotic nature of beauty and horror in the Black queer experience. Maho Ogawa’s Choreographic Score Mural is a score in the form of a geometric mapping of the movement of the body on the walls of the gallery. On 11/1 the mural will be activated by Ogawa and two dancers in a series of spontaneous movements that, following the philosophy of Ichigo-Ichie, embrace the unrepeatability of movement. Sahra Motalebi’s installation explores the historical meanings of the imagination in its connection to metaphor-making and to the breath. It will become the site for a workshop on the voice she will lead on 11/7. Xavier Cha’s Untitled (caretaker) is a livestreamed video of a performer wearing a GoPro chest harness, only allowing access to a disorienting view of limbs. On 11/14 the performance will be livestreamed from a remote studio space on campus to the gallery. Taken together, these works offer the body as a tool for making pictures that slide between and across rooms and screens.
The Movement-Image will be on view in Hagan Gallery from October 16 through November 21, with performances scheduled throughout. The exhibition and performance series are presented by the Lewis Center’s Program in Visual Arts and supported through Princeton’s John Sacret Young ’69 Fund for Visiting Filmmakers.
Read more about The Movement-Image in the press release
Event Tickets & Details
All events in The Movement-Image series are free and open to the public; no tickets required.
Click on the events below for more details about each artist & performance, including directions and accessibility information.
