KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Marcel Dzama

22 Feb - 29 Mar 2015

Marcel Dzama,
Une Danse des Bouffons (A Jester's Dance),
2013, Video still, Video projection, black and white, sound
© Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, Commissioned by Toronto International Film Festival, 2013.
MARCEL DZAMA
Une Danse des Bouffons (A Jester's Dance)
22 February - 29 March 2015

UNE DANSE DES BOUFFONS (A JESTER'S DANCE), the new film by Canadian artist Marcel Dzama (born 1974, lives and works in New York), will be shown at KW Projects from February 22, 2015. Created in 2013 for the Toronto International Film Festival as a tribute to David Cronenberg, the nearly 35-minute film is on view for the first time in Germany.
In the film, Dzama reimagines the tragic love story between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins (played by Kim Gordon and Hannelore Knuts) as a psychodrama, which renegotiates presupposed polarities of good and evil, love and antipathy, dance and battle, lust and violence. Accompanied by a morbid soundtrack by members of the band Arcade Fire the atmospheric images and surreal characters of this silent film carry the viewers off into an apparently fictitious fairytale world, full of art historical references. In fact, many scenes are based on well-known images of real violence, leaving us insecure as to how we should perceive and process such distorted pictures of torture, terrorism, corruption and power.

Kindly supported by the Embassy of Canada.
 

Tags: Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Dzama, Kim Gordon