Jenny Perlin: The Same Moon Everywhere
12 April – 30 April 2013
P74 Gallery, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 1, Ljubljana
discussion / workshop / exhibition
The discussion with the artist on Friday, 12 April at 6 p.m. & Exhibition opening: at 7 p.m.
Jenny Perlin, The Same Moon Everywhere, 16mm/HD, 2013
Courtesy of the artist and galleries M+R Fricke Berlin and Simon Preston, New York
The projects of American visual artist and lecturer Jenny Perlin deal with the interdisciplinary research of history, literature, linquistics and culture. She herself stresses: “I discovered that film, drawings and photography were useful media in which I can show concepts. My projects demand that the viewer reconsiders his/her relationsihp to cultural narratives. Just like an archeaologist I create with fragments, speculations, hypotheses and afterthoughts. That happens in the space where I move and invent, where I locate my artistic practice.”
Her artistic works from the field of video and film often also expand into the field of drawings, artist’s books, multiples, posters and installations. Since 1991 Jenny Perlin has created more than ten video works and films and numerous series of drawings and paintings. Some of her works are documentary, some are fiction, some have been created in the technique of stop-motion animation. In all the fields of her artistic practice she delves deeply into the ways in which social incongruencies are reflected in the smallest aspects of everyday life. Whether she’s copying a receipt from Walmart or recording in documentary style, her interest is connected to questions such as how the statements of History fatefully influence the minor details of human experience.
Jenny Perlin, The Same Moon Everywhere, 16mm/HD, 2013
Courtesy of the artist and galleries M+R Fricke Berlin and Simon Preston, New York
The video film The Same Moon Everywhere, which will have its premiere in Ljubljana, is a metaphor of memory, which the artist visualises with a spider web, Jacob’s Ladder and a corridor full of documents and art works. The person who carries the artistic works in the corridor is a combination of different time segments and spatial locations – a young girl from Kosova, whom the artist met years ago in a Berlin library. The filmic narration is nonlinear, switching between personal memories, poetic associations and fictionality.
The drawings of Jenny Perlin work in accordance with the documentary tradition – as well as against it. Her works are most often translations of memory and different histories: of personal history, of the history of a particular city/place, of cultural and national histories. These narrations intersect, support and also contradict one another.
After obtaining her BA in media and cultural studies from Brown University, Jenny Perlin received her MFA in film from the School of the Art Insitute of Chicago, and completed postgraduate studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In the last years she teaches film and installation at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She is the recipient of several fellowships, grants and residencies, among them, the Arnold Foundation Fellowship for Independent Film Production, Experimental Television Center Grant for Film and Video and the New York State Council for the Arts Finishing Funds. Several of her films have premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2003 and 2004).
Jenny Perlin, The Same Moon Everywhere, 16mm/HD, 2013
Courtesy of the artist and galleries M+R Fricke Berlin and Simon Preston, New York
Her video works, drawings and films have been exhibited in many exhibitions and important presentation centres, among them, the Whitney Museum, the Havana Biennial, San Francisco Cinematheque, the Pacific Film Archive, the Walker Art Center, Kino Arsenal, Berlin; P.S.1/MoMA, New York; KunstWerke, Berlin; Drawing Center, New York; Shedhalle, Zurich; Queens Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Renaissance Society, Chicago.
In conjunction with the exhibition we are also pleased to announce the release of her new artist’s book The Same Moon Everywhere, which will be available at the opening in limited quantity.
The programme of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute is supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia and by the Municipality of Ljubljana, Department for Culture.