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Joan Jonas

After 18 years in the present building, CCA Kitakyushu will move to a new space. As the final show in our Project Gallery, we celebrate the work of Joan Jonas in the CCA video archive, coinciding with her show ‘They come to us without a word’ at the US Pavilion as part of the 2015 Venice Biennale. ‘They come to us without a word’ was also the title of Jonas’s second show at CCA Project Gallery in 2013. Her first show at CCA was ‘Double Lunar Rabbits’ in 2010, then the third was ‘It blew right in my ear like the wind’ in 2014.

Wind 1968, Black & White, Silent, 16mm transferred onto DVD
One of the first film works Jonas made, Wind was filmed at a beach covered with snow. Against the snowfield, a group of people, buffeted by a gust of strong wind, are performing rhythmical and symmetrical movements. In this film, many elements such as the choreography, the thick coats with mirrors, and the strong wind are layered and propel this minimal yet very particular atmosphere.

Reading Dante II 2009
Jonas developed multiple iterations of Reading Dante, originally as performance then also as an installation series. This film documents her Venice Biennale performance in 2013. Inspired by Dante’s fourteenth-century poem The Divine Comedy, the work is a multimedia collage composed of her own performance with her collaborators and footage shot in the Canadian woods, 1970s New York, a ruin surrounding a lava field in Mexico City, and a shadow play in Italy. Jonas translates Dante’s vision according to her perspective in the present moment.

This post is also available in: Japanese