Frankfurt / Rotterdam - Kunstverein / Witte de With - Manon de Boer

FRANKFURT / ROTTERDAM - KUNSTVEREIN / WITTE DE WITH - MANON DE BOER
THE TIME THAT IS LEFT

08.02 > 27.04.2008
Kunstverein Frankfurt

25.01 > 24.02.2008
Witte de With, Rotterdam

Manon de Boer's work analyzes the possibilities of film in visual art. She often challenges the conventions and assumptions of the documentary genre. Drawn to individuals with unusual personal histories, she creates intimate portraits that question their own, revealing the inherent instability (perhaps even impossibility) of narrating one's life as a coherent biography.

In working with the same people (often actors, musicians, intellectuals) over extended periods of time, de Boer explores the disjunctions between lived time and recorded history. Her work captures the post-Modern shift from communal to individual histories. With the repetitions and cuts in her films, she avoids portraying time as either linear or chronological.

At the Frankfurter Kunstverein 8 large installations will be represented, including video projections and 16mm films, which represent de Boer's work from 1996 till 2007. It will be the most comprehensive presentation of de Boer's work to date, as the exhibition will also display an ongoing audio archive of interviews the artist has been conducting with musicians, dancers and composers of the 1970s; as well as a display of images, text and scripts she uses as source materials.

For De Boer, history is not a linear account of events but the experience of continuously working through, selecting and linking memories in a very specific way. Using personal narration as a method, de Boer explores the relationship between language, time and claims to the truth. Narrated history - by iconic figures of their time such as Sylvia Kristel or Suely Rolnik - allows the artist to introduce the question of memory, belief as well as to investigate correspondences between lived time and history.

As from 25 January onwards, Witte de With presents two films by de Boer: Sylvia Kristel - Paris (2003) and Presto, Perfect Sound (2006). These films will be screened within the framework of Liam Gillick's solo exhibition at Witte de With, which has imposed an architectural meta-structure onto the gallery spaces, designating which rooms are to be used for the presentation of his own work and which are to be seen as "institutional zones".

Witte de With Rotterdam and Frankfurter Kunstverein will co-publish de Boer's first major monograph, to appear in spring 2008.

More information:
www.wdw.nl
www.fkv.de

 
Image:
Sylvia Kristel – Paris, 2003
Film still super-8 transferred on video
© Manon de Boer
Courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels