Memory, temporal displacement and translational activity also intersect in After Hiroshima Mon Amour. This work is based on the Alain Resnais / Marguerite Duras film collaboration of 1959 in which a love story in the present is mediated by trauma and the past. Kolbowski intervenes by critically “reproducing” the love story with a series of actors and by inserting and juxtaposing footage of both U.S.military actions in Iraq and the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina so that violence, love, trauma, war and history, – as well as Kolbowski’s video and Resnais’ film – become inextricably tied to one another.

Silvia Kolbowski is an artist based in New York. Her scope of address includes the ethics of history, memory, sexuality, and the unconscious. She began her career in the 1970s by producing photographic works, public interventions, and site specific installations that have always been sensitive to the socio-political climate of their time. Her 2004 project Proximity to Power, American Style, a slide/audio work about the relational aspects of masculine power was published in its entirety by WhiteWalls and University of Chicago Press (2008). In 2007 she exhibited a revised version of her 1999 an inadequate history of conceptual art at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Her most recent project, a video and photo work entitled After Hiroshima Mon Amour, (2008), premiered in September at LA><ART in Los Angeles, curated by Christopher Bedford. Kolbowski’s work has been exhibited internationally, including a 2004 one-person exhibition at the Secession, Vienna, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, The Walker Art Center, and an upcoming installation at The Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana. She is on the advisory board of October journal.

www.silviakolbowski.com