EXHIBITION

A collection of images reproduced from other films, museums, and archives, not to mention the opening pun “Love Laughs at Locksmiths – Houdini,” Exhibition weaves together multiple biographies and texts. A woman marries the Berlin Wall and turns her home in Sweden into a museum of architectural miniatures that “preserve the wall’s parallel lines.” Mary Richardson stabs Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus as an act of protest for an imprisoned suffragette. Shifting into first person point-of-view, the narration combines quotations from the painter Agnes Martin, Freud’s case histories, and the paradox presented by the Klein Bottle. The film fragments, copies, and excerpts to create a portrait of desire and trespass, becoming a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood, while it also tackles the pain chain that torments the Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, “The film as a property needs to be seen. Once exhibited, it’s simple to recapture in an unrestricted form. In copyright law, this vulnerability is called the analog hole. If something can be sensed, it can be ripped.” Visually enthralling in spite of the deliberately toneless narrator, the film is accompanied just like an essay by footnotes with bibliographical sources.