WARNING PALACE & THE YELLOW LINE

Irit Batsry (EUA)

Warning Palace

Site-specific, security tapes printed with legends “caution” e “danger”, canvas, videoloop, Variable Dimensions, 2013.

A new site-specific series of installations created during an artist residency in 2012, the works, built with industrial yellow and red tapes printed with the words “Caution” and “Danger” probe the tension between the organic and the mechanical, the industrial and the craftlike, speak of borders and transgressions, inclusion and exclusion, and question our perception and our relationship to the environment.
The installations are spread in different areas:
Clearly visible from the street, one of the Façade’s windows is filled with entangled yellow and red tapes. The same ‘screen’, encountered inside, creates a ‘membrane’ between the outside and inside.
The palace’s main staircase and the red gallery each include Caution and Danger tapes clusters behind a mounted canvas set into one of their windows to become part of the architecture. The sun, acting as a ‘projector’, activates on the surface of each canvas a subtle moving image thus turning it into a hybrid between a painting, a sculpture, and a time-based work. A third Canvas unit is found, lying face-up next to the second window in the red gallery, allowing the viewers to see its’ ‘entrails’. The same gallery also includes a projection of an intervention filmed by the artist on-site. An installation at the garden’s central fountain complements this series of works.
Warning Palace is part of the ongoing body of work 'Caution/Danger' (started in 2007), including to-date several large scale installations, ephemeral sculptures and photographs.

The Yellow Line (in the white gallery)

Multi-channel video installation, mixed media, variable dimensions, 2007/2013.

The Yellow Line (in the white gallery) surrounds the viewers by video projections of people watching behind security tapes thus transforming documentary material into a spacial experience.

The installation juxtaposes the sumptuous architecture of the palace with the urgency of street life in the Sertão in North East Brazil were the people that appear to be staring at the viewers were filmed looking at the filming of O Céu de Suely by Karim Ainouz.

The work, speaking of boundaries and transgression, subverts ideas about exclusion and inclusion, center and periphery. The margins of the set become the center of attention. Prevented from entering the film set, the onlookers on location become the subject of this work as well as its “actors”. The yellow line - a thin separation between the quotidian and cinematic artifice - becomes a protagonist and the viewer stands in for the ‘absent’ film set.

The Yellow Line (in the white gallery) joins an ongoing cycle of works that originate from material shot by the artist on the sets of Brazilian feature films. The first, Set, a multi-channel video installation and architectural outdoor projection was shown at the Whitney Museum in 2003-2004. The work transposed material shot by the artist on the set of Madame Sata by Karim Ainouz in 2001 in an inquiry, between documentary and fiction, about image making, representation, marginality, social difference and conflict.

The cycle continues with a work that originates from material shot in Fortaleza on the set of Praia do Futuro in 2013 currently in-progress. Spread over time, different geographical locations and historical periods, it becomes also a fragmented portrait of the different Brasils’ encountered by the artist.

Irit Batsry is an artist working mainly in video and installations. Her work has been shown extensively in 35 different countries. In 2002, she was awarded the prestigious Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award. She also received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1992 and the Grand Prix Video de Création of the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, Paris (1996 and 2001) as well as many prizes including: Grand Prix - Locarno 90 and 95, First Prize - Vigo 94 and 01 First Prize - the Australian Video Festival in 1989.

Selected shows include the National Gallery in Washington, the National Film Theater and the ICA (London), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid), Museu d'Arte Moderna (Rio), Ludwig Museum (Koln), Tel Aviv Museum, Artists Space,  the Whitney and the MOMA in NYC. The Jeu de Paume in Paris, in 2006, organized a retrospective of her videotapes (1981-2006).

Artist's site

Co-production: Duplacena and Irit Batsry Studio 

Irit Batsry's work are represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica; Bendana Pinel l Art Contemporain, Paris; Aut Aut Arte Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro; and Heure Exquise! (video distribution).