SARAH MORRIS

Finite and Infinite Games which Morris completed earlier this year, casts German theorist, writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge in a philosophical conflict and performance juxtaposed to the empty and not yet opened Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Morris sees this space as a ‘void’. She used the concert hall in juxtaposition with a reading and dialogue between Alexander Kluge and herself on James P. Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games, published in 1986. The seminal text lays out two opposing world-views of structuring activity, politics, thinking, navigation, strategy and creativity. Morris asks Kluge to speak of his beginnings as the Frankfurt School’s lawyer, later working for Fritz Lang and eventually becoming one of the main figures of New German Cinema. Carse’s game theory becomes a focal point and encompasses all sociological and individual movements, whether aesthetic or otherwise, and questions the role of the artist in this scenario. The relations between the freedoms of infinite possibilities versus the rule-based operations of finite game playing are at the centre of a dichotomy laid out by Morris and Kluge.

As a result of their dialogue and friendship, Morris and Kluge decided to collaborate on Mimosa Tank: A Prologue for a Film. This film began with Morris’s interest in Fritz Lang’s story told in Beverly Hills in 1964 regarding his invitation by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to become the head of German film studio UFA; Lang´s possible co-optation and ultimately refusal. This story of a false start and navigation both globally and political, is akin to Theodor W. Adorno sending Kluge to Lang in the first place in order to deter Kluge´s interest in film. The work, to be expanded into a longer film, will have its premiere at Capitain Petzel. ’Mimosa Tank’ a homage to Fritz Lang, plays with both the director’s story and the silent film.

For Morris painting and film-making are two sides of the same coin« and equal important to her practice. Through each medium the artist creates a new place of politics, creating visions of play, possibility and intrigue. Executed in household gloss paint on square canvases, Morris’s paintings, redolent with algorithmic grids, capture the essence of the moment. Within this framework, conspiracies, QR codes, visual sound diagrams, film posters or pharmaceutical packaging are fair game.

Sarah Morris (b. 1967, American) lives and works in New York. She has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien (2016), M Museum Leuven (2015), Kunsthalle Bremen (2013), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2012), K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2010), Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2009), Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2009), Lenbachaus, München (2008), Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2008), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006), Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2005), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005), Kunstforeningen, Kopenhagen (2004), Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2001), Kunsthalle Zürich (2000).