It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards

MFA Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts presents “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” an exhibition of work by multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez (MFA 1992 Fine Arts), an SVA alumnus and faculty member. Curated by faculty member Gianni Jetzer, the exhibition will be on view Saturday, January 17 - Saturday, January 31, 2015 at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor, New York City.MFA Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts presents “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” an exhibition of work by multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez (MFA 1992 Fine Arts), an SVA alumnus and faculty member. Curated by faculty member Gianni Jetzer, the exhibition will be on view Saturday, January 17 - Saturday, January 31, 2015 at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor, New York City.The exhibition brings together four works: Looking for Alfred (2004), an homage to Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in his films, with a cast of look-alikes; Hitchcock didn’t have a Belly Button: Interview with Karen Black (2010), a recorded interview of the actress recounting her experiences with the legendary filmmaker; You Tube Me and I Tube You, a two-channel interaction installation and web project initiated in 2010; and I may have forever lost my umbrella (2011), a color short with a narration based on Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet underneath the images of YouTube videos of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which is shown in New York for the first time in this exhibition.Johan Grimonprez's works are part of the permanent collections of major museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan, and Tate Modern, London. His award winning films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) and Double Take (2009). In 2011 Hatje Cantz Verlag published a reader on his work entitled It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards, with contributions by Jodi Dean, Thomas Elsaesser, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Slavoj Žižek. His current film project, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade by author Andrew Feinstein, was awarded a development grant from the Sundance Institute. His next film project, How to Rewind your Dog, is in development with the Flanders Audiovisual Fund and the European MEDIA Programme. Grimonprez divides his time between Brussels and New York.SVA MFA Fine Arts reflects the diversity of New York’s many art worlds. Together, the faculty and students form a community of established and emerging artists from many backgrounds who work across disciplines and modes of practice. The department’s main goals are to provide a stimulating and supportive environment in which students can thrive and develop as artists, to foster rigorous critical engagement with contemporary art and other cultural forms and to produce an ongoing conversation through work as much as through words about what we make, how we make it and why.

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