Mirroring the Musée
Mirroring the Musée was commissioned by the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in 2008 and is currently on view. The work is exhibited in the same room where it was produced. In this work the viewer is like a ghost caught between two mirrors, and there is also the issue of the posing spectators, visible in the videos and yet no longer in the gallery.
My models were all employees of the Musée, something I often do in the Museum works. To me it is interesting to recast within the museum people who work in the building every day, yet whose relationship to whatever works I shoot them with may be very different.
- Adad Hannah
Production Images
Starting with Adad Hannah’s most recent piece, Burghers of Seoul, this exhibition brings together works by this artist that take as their point of departure narrative models or conventions stemming from the history of art. The idea of replaying and reconsidering conventions in order to recast them began with Museum Stills. Filmed in various museums, these videos form a series of tableaux vivants in which immobile "actors” re-contextualize painterly scenes or behaviours induced by the conventions of the image or the museum context. This line of study would continue with Burghers of Seoul, which gives us a video reconstruction of Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (1884-1895). In the Museum Stills series, the camera remained still while the characters held their poses; with this later piece, however, Hannah filmed immobile bodies by making use of the moving image. In a continuous dolly shot, the camera moved around Rodin’s sculpture, capturing through its movement the six male bodies sculpted in stone. As the title indicates, the famous sculpture was thereby recast in a series of redistributions of roles and shots, with an initial reconstruction involving performances by motorcycle couriers in Seoul, South Korea. In this way, Hannah filmed something immobile so that it could be perceived in terms of movement. Rodin’s sculpture thereby became the point of departure for a narrative and temporal exploration that extended its potential for interpretation. This reconstruction of Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais re-actualizes the Modernist myth of the separation of the arts of time and space, and reintroduces the problem of narration posed by modernism.
- Marie Fraser, Curator, 10th edition of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal: Replaying Narrative
This project has been presented in the following exhibitions:
2008, Intrus / Intruders, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Curated by Mélanie Boucher.
Related Press: