Silvia Kolbowski is an American artist who uses diverse strategies to subtly and incisively question the workings of culture, politics, history and the unconscious. Rich interweavings and overlays run through her work creating multiple points of view and engaging the viewer in complex activities of framing, relating and reflecting that result in a form of ethical questionning.This exhibition investigates her practice by presenting two multi-part installations realized over the last ten years: an inadequate history of conceptual art (1998-1999) and After Hiroshima Mon Amour (2008).

an inadequate history was made in the wake of artists’ renewed interest in conceptual art and various reassessments of its contribution to art history. It represents an attempt by Kolbowski to examine the significance of this return. Anonymous audio recordings of remembered personal experiences of a conceptual work from the 60s and early 70s are juxtaposed with video images of the various speakers’ hands. The shifting borders of memory and the unconscious language of gestures confront the historicization of a period.

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


The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s contemporary exhibition program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Publication

Silvia Kolbowski. Nothing and Everything Rien et tout Edited by Michèle Thériault Essays: Christopher Bedford, Rosalyn Deutsche Entretien : Michèle Thériault and Silvia Kolbowski January 2009, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery 88 pp., col. Illustrations $20.00 (paper) ISBN 978-2920394-79-7 More...