MOMA Presents Projects 95: Runa Islam, Closes 9/19

For Projects 95: Runa Islam, The Museum of Modern Art presents British artist Runa Islam's new 35mm film Emergence (2011), commissioned for this exhibition, alongside three of her other films selected specifically in relation to the new work: The house belongs to those who inhabit it (2008), Magical Consciousness (2010), and This Much Is Uncertain (2009-10). For these works, Islam (b. 1970, Dhaka, Bangladesh) constructs austere, minimal installations that take the conventions, histories, materiality, and grammar of film-its language of framing, panning, zooming, editing, and projection-as the bases for structural investigations and narrative experiment. Astutely aware that perception of the world is mediated by cinematic and technological representation, Islam positions her images on the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, legibility and silence, stability and instability, syntactical simplicity and symbolic complexity. Projects 95 is organized by Christian Rattemeyer, The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art. The Elaine Dannheisser Projects series is coordinated by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director, The Museum of Modern Art.

Emergence (2011) explores the relationship between film and still photography. The work shows a photographic print in a developing bath, enlarged from a glass negative taken in the early 1900s in Tehran, during the Persian Constitutional Revolution. As the picture emerges, a city square comes into view; then the photograph, left in the developing bath, slowly darkens and the image vanishes again into the paper's black surface. Emergence further complicates the nature of documenting violent and dramatic events, as the work also shows the fractures the negative endured, which occurred during the violent events that surround the subject of the image. In the end, the objects in the work are silent, and all that remains is the act of looking, animated and then denied in the material transformation of the image.

Projects 95: Runa Islam
May 27-September 19, 2011
The Michael H. Dunn Gallery, second floor