Indistinct Chatter

Monika Baer, William Leavitt, Matt Mullican, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Lise Soskolne, Masha Tupitsyn, Robin Waart, Yong Xiang-Li curated by Pia-Marie Remmers

Matt Mullican, Untitled (Details from Fictional Reality) (Detail), 2009, Collage, comic strip on paper, Courtesy of the artist and Mai 36, Zurich

Indistinct Chatter is a group exhibition dedicated to film, while at the same time excluding it. Since the 1970s, exhibition spaces have become more frequently transformed into quasi movie theaters, with video works forming an integral part of contemporary artists’ often immersive installations. But how do we attend to the sensation and pull of the cinematic when the moving image is absent? The works on view range from narrative snippets and movie props to closing credits, without showing a single motion picture. Temporality and movement are largely suspended, while the apparent subplots and by-products of the cinematic are put into the spotlight. A nod to Louise Lawler’s “A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture” (1979) where the audience was invited to watch a full-length film in a regular cinema without its visual component, the exhibition tackles questions of performativity, narration and representation in front of and behind the screen.