Silvia Kolbowski, After Hiroshima Mon Amour

After Hiroshima Mon Amour, 2008, black & white photo, photographic production: Jeff Barnett-Winsby

8 May - 14 June 2009
Mala galerija, Slovenska cesta 35, Ljubljana

Silvia Kolbowski's scope of address includes the ethics and politics of history, culture, feminism, and the unconscious. Developed over a three-year period (2005-2008), After Hiroshima Mon Amouris a 22-minute video that looks through the lens of the celebrated 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour (directed by Alain Resnais; written by Marguerite Duras) at sites of American incursion and neglect - Iraq and New Orleans. After Hiroshima Mon Amour uses various visual and aural strategies to layer and analyze past and present instances of violence and trauma. Titles, silence, color, brief sync sound, and music are used to create a new story out of an old one. The allegorical couple of the 1959 film is played by ten interconnecting actors, who blur the categories of ethnicity, race, and gender. Various scenes in black-and-white are faithfully recreated from the 1959 film; contemporary material downloaded from the Internet and a remix of the score and sound design of the Resnais/Duras film are incorporated.

Transference, exclusion, projection, the logic of desire and the repression of the psyche's blind spots - and how these unconscious processes relate to politics, history writing, and memory - are leitmotifs of Kolbowski's works, such as an inadequate history of conceptual art (1998-99), Like Looking Away (2000-02), and Proximity to Power, American Style (2003-04). These processes also appear in the form of a question about the presumption of knowledge, lack and absence in After Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Silvia Kolbowski is an artist based in New York. She is on the advisory board of the journal October and teaches in the CCC program at the Haute École d'Art et de Design, Geneva.

Accompanying exhibition catalogue with a text by Luiza Nader.
Exhibition curator Igor Španjol.

The project has been supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

Opening hours: Tuesday - Sunday 10.00 - 15.30 & 16.00 - 18.00. Free admission.