B L U E W A V E L u t z B a c h e r is the final large-scale multimedia installation of Bacher’s forty-year career, produced in the seven month period prior to her death in May, 2019. Moskva (2019), consists of nearly 100 prints, acting as the centerpiece of the exhibition. This unframed work will be installed in the Contemporary Art Center Gallery. Rocket (2016-18), originally commissioned for SITE Santa Fe, will be installed inside the glass wall lobby of the Contemporary Art Center rendering it visible from outside of the building. A two-channel video projection, Blue Wave (2019), will be installed inside the University Art Gallery and a series of short videos Bacher titled Modules (2018-19), will be screened continuously on computer screens in UC Irvine’s, Department of Art, Digital Filmmaking Lab. Lutz Bacher (1943-2019), a pseudonym, was an American conceptual, interdisciplinary artist based in Berkeley, CA from the 1970s until 2013, when she relocated to New York. Known for three decades as a “cult” artist of profound influence, she achieved mainstream international acclaim in the final decade of her forty-year career. Her extensive oeuvre spanned image and text, photography, painting, sculpture and video to large-scale multimedia installation. In a mode of cultural anthropology, Bacher’s work is distinguished by its visceral scrutiny of the reoccurring themes of violence, masculinity, memory, sexuality and the body. Recent solo exhibitions include K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf; Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette (2018); KADIST, San Francisco (2017); Yale Union, Portland (2016); Greene Naftali Garage, Brooklyn (2016); Secession, Vienna (2016); Greene Naftali, New York (2015); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2014); Greene Naftali, New York (2014). Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Organized by Monica Majoli On view in University Art Gallery & Contemporary Arts Center Gallery ---- In [a] Gödel universe, it is provable that there exist closed timelike curves such that if you travel fast enough, you can, though always heading toward your local future, arrive in the past. These closed loops or circular paths have a more familiar name: time travel. But if it is possible in such worlds, as Gödel argues, to return to one’s past, then what was past never passed at all. Palle Yourgrau, A World without Time, 2004 When we look out into the world and ask, “Where is art,” we are really pondering, “When is art?” For contemporary space is reciprocally — and inextricably — bound up with historical time. Such that, art is always in transit; not only in its various spatial adaptations throughout history, where we encounter it, but in its temporal apparitions, at once past, present and future. Quantum mechanics has a name for this phenomenon: space-time. The subject of Beirut Lab: 1975(2020) — a film installation at UC Irvine’s Room Gallery in Fall 2019 — features contemporary film essays produced by artists living and working in Beirut, a site where time bends and curves, as in a Gödel universe. Here, as elsewhere, historical events are what semioticians call a “sliding signifier,” an image-unit that floats between the past, present and future, then back again in one’s mind. Counter-intuitively, Beirut is also a city where particular events function as a kind of collective caesura — an historical blank space — within cultural consciousness. The most prominent of these events being the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1991, which has (and continues) to provoke critically minded artists to engage in a type of hermeneutic aesthetics of past moments in time. For instance, artists of one generation, who were in primary school in the seventies, wrangle with screen memories of that moment, which can neither be completely remembered nor forgotten. Alternately, a younger generation of artists attempts to untangle that which they never knew themselves but which they have inherited as a gap in Lebanon’s state sanctioned national history. But, already, this generational schema is a bit too tidy. For there are those artists in the region whose artwork critically investigate the more general question of memory, history and, therefore, temporality, by subtending the perspectival positions of the aforementioned generational lines. The film essays featured in Beirut Lab: 1975(2020), showcase all three such perspectives. Films by: Basma Alsharif, Panos Aprahamian, Mohamed Berro, Gregory Buchakjian & Valerie Cachard, Ali Cherri, Toni Geitani, Daniele Genadry, Amer Ghandour, Ahmad Ghossein, Ghassan Halwani, Mustapha Jundi, Nadim Mishlawi, Heather M. O'Brien, Raed and Rania Rafei, Walid Sadek, Ghassan Salhab, Mohamed Soueid, Rania Stephan, and Jalal Toufic. Installation: A film program of 30 films screened over five days a week, for ten weeks. Each day’s grouping — an essay of film-essays — ponders the imbricated questions: When in Time is Beirut? Where in Beirut is Time? Beirut Lab: 1975(2020) furthers the investigation made by the exhibition, entitled again, rubbed smooth, a moment in time__caesura, mounted at the American University of Beirut, Spring 2019. (Website: againrubbedsmooth.org) On view in Room Gallery Events & Programming: The place from which one speaks: A Conversation with Michelle Dizon & Heather M. O’Brien Friday, October 11th, 2019 3:30-6pm Room Gallery www.michelledizon.com www.heathermobrien.com This dialogue will explore what it means to make image-based work about a place when the author is not understood to be from that place. How are understandings of “place” made and what subjective and historical registers urge artists to ground their practice in a politics of solidarity. Taking Dizon’s Gaza Before the Law (2018), shot in Los Angeles and Palestine, and O'Brien's film, dyad gaze (2019), shot in Beirut, Lebanon as starting points, the artists will discuss the privilege of mobility, decolonial strategies for documentation, the legacy of images of war and domesticity, and Trinh T. Minh-ha's idea of "speaking nearby." O'Brien was a student of Dizon's at CalArts from 2011-2013, in courses including "Visualities and the Alterglobal," "The Work of War in Times of Art," and "Feminism in Translation." When is Beirut? Symposium Tuesday, November 19, 2019 9am-1pm Humanities Gateway (HG 1010) 2pm-6pm Contemporary Arts Center (CAC 3201) Speakers: TBD In collaboration with UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts, the School of Humanities’ emphasis in Global Middle Eastern Studies and UCI’s Illuminations initiative, When is Beirut? Symposium is a one-day event organized concurrently with, and in response to, UC Irvine’s Fall 2019 Room Gallery film installation program Beirut Lab: 1975(2020). When is Beirut? Symposium will invite UC-wide theoreticians, emerging scholars, and film/video practitioners whose work and research engages with Lebanon to interrogate both the film essays and the theoretical propositions which subtend the works in the exhibition. When is Beirut? Symposium will furthermore invert the conventional model by which theoreticians discuss theories and artist/practitioners explicate artworks. In the symposium’s morning session, which will take place in the School of Humanities’ HG 1010, artists and film/video practitioners will be invited to challenge, and extend, the exhibition’s theoretical propositions. In the afternoon session, which will take place adjacent to the Room Gallery in the University’s Contemporary Arts Center Colloquium facility (CAC 3201), theoreticians and scholars will be asked to engage with the works on view in the film installation. Through paper presentations and panel discussions, theoreticians and practitioners will meet to confront multiple, simultaneous and divergent perspectives on the political, theoretical, and aesthetic consequences of the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1991.