Artists Space

Artists Space Dialogues:
Sarah Morris and Bettina Funcke

Maneuvering Systems: the Artist and the Protagonist

Conversation
March 3, 2016, 7pm

One of the defining characteristics of Artists Space’s work is dialogue: dialogue between artists, writers, scholars, theorists and our audiences.

Artists Space Dialogues takes the simple format of a public conversation between two people. Every month renowned art historian Bettina Funcke will talk with an influential figure in the field of contemporary art and visual culture, investigating their work and thinking, their histories, trajectories, and processes.

Close-up of a bottle of golden Dior perfume decorated with a black bow resting on a white surface.
Sarah Morris, still from Strange Magic, 2014. REDCODE HD digital video, 45 min 8 sec. Courtesy the artist. [Close-up of a bottle of golden Dior perfume decorated with a black bow resting on a white surface.]

Since the late 1990s, Sarah Morris has produced an extensive body of films and paintings, together creating a new language of place and politics.

Taking cities as her framework, Morris’s work plays with social and bureaucratic typologies, implicating occluded systems of control: President Bill Clinton, Chase Bank, Philip Johnson, Robert Towne, the Olympics, Oscar Niemeyer, J.G. Ballard, perfume, lunar cycles, pharmaceutical packaging, birdcages and even fruits are fair game. In Bettina Funcke’s words: “She wants to be both author and protagonist, and to her that means using compromised personalities and places as portals into entanglements of power, generating a sense of dizzying simultaneity that she translates into motives and resources for her paintings and a flow of images for her films, all of which add up to topologies of a moment in the life of power and style.”

Recent exhibitions include: M Museum, Leuven (2015); Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen (2013); Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot (2012); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2012); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2009); Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (2009); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2008).