LUMIAR CITÉ

Sid Iandovka & Anya Tsyrlina with
Leslie Thornton & Thomas Zummer
ONCE IN A HUNDRED YEARS
27.04. – 28.07.2024

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Press-Release (port)
Press-Release (eng)

23.04 | 19h Tunneling, artist talk by Leslie Thornton

(Maumaus, Av. António Augusto de Aguiar,148–3ºC)

27.04 | 17h Opening of the exhibition

A combined exhibition with Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg (18.05 — 28.07.2024)

© Sid Iandovka / Leslie Thornton, twins of earth, 2024, video still

once in a hundred years brings together work by Sid Iandovka and Anya Tsyrlina with that of Leslie Thornton and Thomas Zummer. Iandovka and Tsyrlina embrace and dismantle technologies and form in a peculiar meditation on the ridiculous and the sublime loitering in the dark corners of consciousness, memory, history and humanity. Thornton is a distinguished and renowned pioneer of media as contemporary art form. Zummer is a conceptual/materialist artist and his unusual skills as a photo-realist draftsman are often a subterfuge for the practice of philosophy through acts of image making.

once in a hundred years features historical and new works, including a collaborative video by Iandovka and Thornton, which explore, among other things, the affinities the artists have sensed in each other’s work from the beginning of their recent encounter. The exhibition orbits around a new eponymous media work by Iandovka and Tsyrlina – a bold experiment in slow flow that allows the work to create itself on its own terms, unsteady and strange, untethered to familiar orders of mediated perception.

With an instability disguised as a story, once in a hundred years conjures a reimagined post-punk tale, a ‘story-space’ in which narrative form breaks into ephemeral songs, a eulogy for the living present, a roll call in an eerie wasteland.

A combined exhibition between Lumiar Cité and Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg (Switzerland) once in a hundred years also engages with the historical and architectural differences between these two institutions.

Sid Iandovka and Anya Tsyrlina (both born in Novosibirsk, USSR) discovered video when they met playing in a teenage noise band. They have collaborated ever since, ultimately creating a uniquely independent production approach to their work across different media. Theirs is a practice that occurs within a condition of statelessness, separate from community, identity and known context. Similarly, their working methods are not products of any educational/professional institutions, and they find it both impossible and unnecessary to create a theoretical framework for what they show.

Leslie Thornton’s (USA) work spans more than fifty years and bridges film to contemporary media practices and technologies. Her works have been exhibited worldwide in a range of venues, such as: MoMA (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), Whitney Biennial (New York), documenta (Kassel), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Raven Row (London) and CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Retrospectives of her work include shows at Anthology Film Archives (New York), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, MA). Thornton has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Alpert Award in the Arts for Media, Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rockefeller Fellowship. Recent artist residencies took place at CERN (Meyrin) and CalTech (Pasadena). Leslie Thornton is a Professor Emerita of Brown University.

Thomas Zummer (USA) is a scholar, writer, artist and curator, whose work in each of these fields is informed by the fluidity with which he crosses their boundaries. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Drawing Room (London), Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona), Exit City Kunsthal (Antwerp), Exit Art and White Box (New York), among other venues. In 1994 Zummer curated ‘CRASH: Nostalgia for the Absence of Cyberspace’ (with Robert Reynolds), the first major exhibition with a significant proportion of digital/online, telepresence and other forms of transmission works. Zummer has curated major exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Thread Waxing Space, the Katonah Museum of Art, CinéClub/Anthology Film Archives, and the Palais des Beaux-arts Brussels. He lives and works in Croton-on-Hudson with his partner Leslie Thornton.