Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery is currently limited to visits by Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.

All related online exhibition programming and events (artist talks, performance, reading, and streaming videos) are free and open to the public at www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/sixvideos. See below for full list of related events.
 

 

A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS is an exhibition of a sculpture, a film and a survey of six recent video works presented in a nontraditional, temporal framework. Nestled into a custom-built atrium in the gallery, the sculpture, Peter Fischli & David Weiss’ Son et lumière (Le Rayon Vert), acts as the pivot or fulcrum for the entire exhibition, the kinetic center around which everything else revolves. Acting as a counterweight, a proto-cinematic object, and a foil, the sculpture will be installed for the entire run of the exhibition and the videos will rotate out, one work projected continuously for two weeks. The vaulted space of the main gallery is darkened into a projection space. As the videos will not be seen in the same place at the same time, they will exist in relation to each other only through memory, engaging one of the fundamental properties of the moving image in the structure of the exhibition itself.

The video works address continuities and discontinuities in time. They connect a deep mystical time to the present tense, visualize cycles, and reach into the future for the potential it may hold for transformation. The green ray, referenced in the subtitle of the sculpture and in the title of the film by Tacita Dean also included in the exhibition, is a naturally-occurring phenomenon, a flash of green light crossing the sky after the sun has set. In the 19th century it was a widely-held Romantic belief in Europe that observing the green ray gave the viewer a heightened perception of the world and viewing the ray was indicative of a coming transformation. Jules Verne encapsulated that ideal in his 1882 novel The Green Ray referring to the color as “the true green of Hope.”

In her collected writings, Dean explains that “looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see.” Dean’s 16mm film The Green Ray (2001) will be screened in the gallery as an event rather than a film installation as it has typically been exhibited. The green ray grounds the temporal framework of the exhibition itself and the specificity of media’s relation to time, delineating difference of time in sculpture, in video, in film, in performance, in event, in exhibition.

Artists include Trisha Baga, Renée Green ’81, Arthur Jafa, Stanya Kahn, Karrabing Film Collective, and Charlotte Prodger.

"How do we imagine a future out of an unsustainable present? Amidst the grief and loss of the global pandemic, systemic racialized violence, a divisive political sphere, the economic crisis, and the larger backdrop of our climate emergency? While we reimagine a way forward to what degree can we look to the form of time itself to hold the power for transformation?" Read more from Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee about the exhibition “A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS,” which he curated, on the Center for the Arts blog.

ONLINE EVENTS
FREE!

Tuesday, September 8 through Sunday, November 22, 2020: Streaming Video - Renée Green's "ED/HF"

Sunday, September 20 through Sunday, November 22, 2020: Streaming Video: Karrabing Film Collective - "Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams"

Friday, October 16 through Wednesday, October 28, 2020: Streaming Video - Stanya Kahn's "Stand in the Stream"

Wednesday, October 21, 2020 at 8pm: Artist Talk - Stanya Kahn

Saturday, November 7, 2020 at 2pm: Performance by Tosh Basco (aka boychild) - "Untitled: darkness"
Followed by a conversation with the artist and collaborator Wu Tsang

Monday, November 9, 2020 at 7:30pm: Conversation - Collective for Radical Death Studies and devynn emory with Anthony Ryan Hatch

Tuesday, November 10 through Sunday, November 22, 2020: Streaming Video - Charlotte Prodger's "BRIDGIT"

Artist Talk - Karrabing Film Collective

Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 6pm: Talk and Reading - Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6pm: Artist Talk - Renée Green '81

EVENTS IN EZRA AND CECILE ZILKHA GALLERY
FREE! Gallery open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.

Video Screenings

September 8–19, 2020: Renée Green, Americas: Veritas (2018)

September 20 – October 2, 2020: Karrabing Film Collective, The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (2018)

October 3 – 15, 2020: Trisha Baga, Winter’s Spring (2018–2020)

October 16 – 28, 2020: Stanya Kahn, Stand in the Stream (2011–2017)

October 29 – November 8, 2020: Arthur Jafa, APEX (2013)

November 10 – 19, 2020: Charlotte Prodger, BRIDGIT (2016)

Film Screenings

Tacita Dean — "The Green Ray"
Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 12:10pm
Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 12:10pm
Friday, November 13, 2020 at 12:10pm

In the Galleries upcoming events page.

Image above:
Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Son et Lumière, 1990
Swiss Army-issued flashlight, turntable, plastic cup, adhesive tape
Dimensions variable
Photograph by David Heald, courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York