Stills - with Atousa Bandeh, Kathe Burkhart and Monali Meher

Stills is a group show, featuring works by acclaimed artists; Atousa Bandeh, Kathe Burkhart and Monali Meher. This show draws together three conceptual artists specifically to reflect on their works related to the medium of film. Each artist has a unique manner of interpreting film on different levels in their work. Bandeh uses a storyboard like poetic energy in drawings to tell multiple stories in one work. Meher delves into an investigative photographic approach by visiting an abandoned film studio in Mumbai and capturing its presence of then and now. Burkhart is ever fascinated by the interplay between characters in films, namely Elizabeth Taylor, how characters are constructed, how we perceive ourselves through them via the medium of film.

Atousa Bandeh’s drawings are stories delved in the ephemeral layers of her memories. She throws her images almost literally onto the paper, thse are images of objects and portraits that conceal a profusion of symbolic associations. Personal memories tend to pop up not in a clear-cut way, but blurred, vague, deformed. Rather than representing a plain narrative, these drawings represent visual poetry. Life, her life is caught in lyrical lines. Expressed in feathery layers of papers.

Kathe Burkhart is best-known for the Liz Taylor Series of paintings that were begun in 1982 at CalArts and are still ongoing. The hundreds of poses in which the actress was immortalized come from still frames from movies, and candid shots from advertising, tabloids, and images from the Internet. In all of these cases, the artist translates her muse into a style that combines Pop imagery and collage with a sort of expressionist deformation, featuring traits from advertising graphics and strident colors, using an extremely varied range of materials and sources, from plywood to marbled paper, fabrics and furs, without excluding, when appropriate, an equally composite range of objects (razor blades, syringes, medical prescriptions, cutlery), that has grown over the years. The use made of the actress as a vehicle can only be understood in reference to the political and feminist activism that Burkhart had undertaken since the late Seventies, and to the social fabric and the media which, according to the analysis of the artist, made Liz into an icon of popular culture. Burkhart has reclaimed the stereotypes that male Western culture packaged for women, and that, ever since the Fifties, have become the main female reference model for women, by blowing them apart.

Monali Meher submerges the audience into the environment of the photographic studio at Hamilton studios, which is based right in the heart of the Ballard Estate in Mumbai, India. She takes us into the empty studio set, where we find a collection of old cameras on the sofa, arranged pedestals on top of each other, scattered old photos, files on the floor, old iron drawer shelves packed with documents and so on, are all the traces of happenings and transitional time. She photographs the rooms exactly how it looked when abandoned, which gives a sense of human presence. She evokes emotions of abandonment, melancholia and neglect, just as the themes in J.G. Ballard’s stories and films.

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