Owen Land
How Can You Believe Anything He Says?!

 

 

22 November 09 – 14 February 10

 

 

Opening: 21.11.2009, 17 - 22 h

German Interviewer: What is the New American Cinema? Owen Land: Well, it's not really new, it's not entirely American and it's not exactly Cinema. Thus the final words of one of the episodes in Dialogues (2007-09), the most recent work by American artist Owen Land. The two main characters are both Owen Land himself: the visual and the literary Owen Land skillfully disputing with one another. Cinematically these dialogues are mirrored by the ways in which the images, the music and the language compete, overlap and intertwine. Mythology, theology and philosophy as well as pornography, art and cultural criticism are all made to clash in Owen Land's simple settings. Rooted in the structural film genre, different episodes conceptually string together in a trash aesthetic that's beyond the New American Cinema.

The exhibition How Can You Believe Anything He Says?! is Owen Land's first solo exhibition in Germany. The presented works are: Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, etc. (1965-66), No Sir, Orison! (1975), New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Develops (1976), Undesirables (Excerpts from a Work in Progress) (1999) und Dialogues (2007-09).