Babette Mangolte , Aneks Gallery
Ana Hušman / Dora Katanić, MMC Gallery
MMC Luka – 20/07/2008 – 10/08/2008
Cinemania[c] 2008 unfolds as two part project occupying two separate exhibition spaces at the same venue MMC Luka, Pula.
It includes a solo exhibition presenting for the first time the works by Babette Mangolte (Aneks Gallery) in Croatia. The second space The MMC Gallery hosts double solo show by two Croatian female artists of the younger generation – Ana Hušman and Dora Katanić. Their work is informed by aspect of social norms and cultural codes.
Babette Mangolte – films and photography
Babette Mangolte was born and raised in France. As a cinematographer, director and photographer, she has been present in the contemporary art, film, dance, theatre and performance scene since the 1970s. In the course of her move to New York City Mangolte started directing films based on experimental narrative in her first features What Maisie Knew (1975), The Camera: Je, La Camera: I (1977) and in the two short films (NOW) and Richard Serra Film Portrait (1976). In the following decades she continued with conceptual documentaries in e.g. Sky in Location (1982) and Les Modeles de Pickpocket (2003).
From the beginning of her practice on, Babette Mangolte did groundbreaking camera work in her collaborations with film director Chantal Akerman and performance artist Yvonne Rainer. In 1978 she directed the legendary dance performance film Watermotor (1978) shooting the solo of New York dancer Trisha Brown with a special dramatization of filmic time.
In her photographic work of the 1970s Mangolte focused on an intellectually and artistically invested style of performance documentation, interacting through her still camera with such characteristic and varying artists such as Richard Foreman and Robert Whitman coming from experimental theater and (minimal) performance protagonists Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and many others. The collaborative spirit of the time is further reflected in the incident that Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass and other personalities of the Soho scene of these days appeared as actors in Mangolte’s own debut What Maisie Knew, portraying scenes of “conceptual intimacy”.
Mangolte’s work has widely been contextualized within the framework of institutional exhibitions presenting New York’s dance, performance, and theatre scene and it is precisely her “anthological” photographs that enabled generations to familiarize themselves with the work of the aforementioned artists. Her film work has been presented in numerous international film festivals and museum’s film programs, e.g. at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. A new film installation of the artist recently premiered at the Berlin Biennial 5.
The exhibition by Babette Mangolte as part of cinemania[c] at the 55th Pula Film Festival is the first presentation of the works of Babette Mangolte in Croatia. The exhibition includes her early films and photographs from the mid-1970s in which she explores the relationship between photography and film, as well as space, film language and subjectivity construction.
The exhibition is organized in cooperation with Anke Kempkes and New York gallery BROADWAY 1602, representing the archive and work of Babette Mangolte.
One Song a Day Takes Mischief Away painting cycle by Dora Katanić parts from the text on which the script for the film with the same name was based, and which is part of our popular culture and film heritage.
Ana Hušman’s installation includes some of the movie props used during the shooting of the film Lunch and creates an atmosphere of a bourgeois saloon – living room. Furthermore, the use of humour and criticism for the interpretation of etiquette in the film ironizes rules for good manners.
Curator: Branka Benčić