Liz Magic Laser
04 - 28 Oct 2012
© Liz Magic Laser
In Camera (2012)
Video still. Five-channel video installation
With actors Anders E Larsson, Karin Hallén and Maria Lindh. Produced by Malmö Konsthall in collaboration with SVT. Script adapted by Liz Magic Laser and Sofia Pontén from Jean Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. Featuring Anders E Larsson and Maria Lindh.
In Camera (2012)
Video still. Five-channel video installation
With actors Anders E Larsson, Karin Hallén and Maria Lindh. Produced by Malmö Konsthall in collaboration with SVT. Script adapted by Liz Magic Laser and Sofia Pontén from Jean Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. Featuring Anders E Larsson and Maria Lindh.
LIZ MAGIC LASER
In Camera
4 – 28 October 2012
In Camera is a performance-based video installation by American artist Liz Magic Laser. Laser’s project for Malmö Konsthall is part of a new body of work that focuses on the relationship between the news media and the public. For In Camera Laser takes the structure of a television news program as the basis for an adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. The three characters in the play are recast in archetypical news program roles: an anchorman in the studio, a reporter on location and a “real” person who gives testimony in a domestic space. The video installation is composed of feeds of each of the three characters, as well as teleprompter footage of the script and a view of Laser and the technical crew in a television news studio control room.
Laser rehearsed the play with the actors in the same space, but it was performed and filmed with each actors in separate locations: in an SVT television news studio in Malmö, on the street in Gustav Adolfs Torg also in Malmö, and in the Finn Juhl House at Ordrupgaard, Denmark (a museum and the former home of the late Danish architect). The performers had to communicate through a satellite conference call that imposed a three-second delay. Only the anchorman in the studio could communicate via the live feed video of the reporter on the scene. All three video channels were filmed simultaneously in a single take. This produced a heightened situation in which the performers, technical crew and Laser had to confront technical communication breakdowns. Laser’s process came to parallel Sartre’s plot of people trapped in their relationships in a room they could not escape. Sartre’s allegory about a hellish three-way dynamic becomes an instrument for navigating the relationship between current events, the news media and the public.
Laser’s live performance and video projects intervene in spaces such as banks and movie theaters, and have involved collaborations with actors, dancers, surgeons, and motorcycle gang members. She stages situations, dialogues, monologues or plays in the urban environment, and its population becomes both her audience and her extras in the resulting videos.
In Camera is produced by Malmö Konsthall in collaboration with SVT Malmö.
We would like to thank Ordrupgaard, Denmark.
Liz Magic Laser (born 1981) lives and works in New York City. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program. Laser is the recipient of awards and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA PS 1, New York (2010); The Pace Gallery, New York (2011); Casey Kaplan, New York (2011); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2012); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2012); Artisterium, Tbilisi, Georgia (2009); the Prague Biennale 4, Czech Republic (2009); the Performa 11 Biennial, New York (2011); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012); and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2012).
In Camera
4 – 28 October 2012
In Camera is a performance-based video installation by American artist Liz Magic Laser. Laser’s project for Malmö Konsthall is part of a new body of work that focuses on the relationship between the news media and the public. For In Camera Laser takes the structure of a television news program as the basis for an adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. The three characters in the play are recast in archetypical news program roles: an anchorman in the studio, a reporter on location and a “real” person who gives testimony in a domestic space. The video installation is composed of feeds of each of the three characters, as well as teleprompter footage of the script and a view of Laser and the technical crew in a television news studio control room.
Laser rehearsed the play with the actors in the same space, but it was performed and filmed with each actors in separate locations: in an SVT television news studio in Malmö, on the street in Gustav Adolfs Torg also in Malmö, and in the Finn Juhl House at Ordrupgaard, Denmark (a museum and the former home of the late Danish architect). The performers had to communicate through a satellite conference call that imposed a three-second delay. Only the anchorman in the studio could communicate via the live feed video of the reporter on the scene. All three video channels were filmed simultaneously in a single take. This produced a heightened situation in which the performers, technical crew and Laser had to confront technical communication breakdowns. Laser’s process came to parallel Sartre’s plot of people trapped in their relationships in a room they could not escape. Sartre’s allegory about a hellish three-way dynamic becomes an instrument for navigating the relationship between current events, the news media and the public.
Laser’s live performance and video projects intervene in spaces such as banks and movie theaters, and have involved collaborations with actors, dancers, surgeons, and motorcycle gang members. She stages situations, dialogues, monologues or plays in the urban environment, and its population becomes both her audience and her extras in the resulting videos.
In Camera is produced by Malmö Konsthall in collaboration with SVT Malmö.
We would like to thank Ordrupgaard, Denmark.
Liz Magic Laser (born 1981) lives and works in New York City. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program. Laser is the recipient of awards and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA PS 1, New York (2010); The Pace Gallery, New York (2011); Casey Kaplan, New York (2011); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2012); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2012); Artisterium, Tbilisi, Georgia (2009); the Prague Biennale 4, Czech Republic (2009); the Performa 11 Biennial, New York (2011); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012); and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2012).