About
Platforms: Collection and Commissions looks at key artists from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection together with newly commissioned film and video works by eleven international contemporary artists. Commissioned by the Walker between 2014 and 2018, the works respond to the influence, inquiry, and inspiration of leading artists and filmmakers in the collection to create new works that premiered first as an online series. These Moving Image Commissions bridge generations: contemporary artists create new works based on the history of experimental film while using multiple platforms to exhibit their work, from online to gallery exhibition. The dynamic initiative weaves together production, scholarship, distribution, and archival work to highlight and grow the collection.
The first installment of the exhibition, Leslie Thornton’s commission They Were Just People (2016), was produced in direct response to the influence and inquiry of Bruce Conner. The piece is a chilling exploration of the purpose and repurposing of memory during wartime, combining Thornton’s manipulated footage of the La Brea Tar Pits in California with an oral account describing moments in the immediate aftermath of the 1945 US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. They Were Just People is a dark, personal response to Crossroads (1976), Conner’s iconic film of the 1946 Bikini Atoll nuclear test.
Future installations in Platforms will include pieces by James Richards and Moyra Davey, inspired by British filmmaker Derek Jarman; Shahryar Nashat and Uri Aran’s work based on the films of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers; and Yto Barrada, Renée Green, Marwa Arsanios, and the duo of Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s commissions that were all influenced by German filmmaker Harun Farocki. The exhibition will conclude with two new commissions produced in 2018 by filmmakers Kevin Jerome Everson and Deborah Stratman.