Works of Michael Snow on view at Akbank Art Center
ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News
The exhibition, co-curated by Ali Akay and Louise Déry, contains works by Snow that are reminiscent of illusionism.
Michael Snow’s “Solo Snow. Works of Michael Snow.” exhibition is being held at Akbank Sanat with the collaboration of Akbank Sanat, Le Fresnoy (Studio national des arts contemporains) and Galerie de l’UQAM.The exhibition, co-curated by Ali Akay and Louise Déry, contains works by Snow that are reminiscent of illusionism.
Born in 1929 in Toronto, Snow is one of the most interesting figures in contemporary video art thanks to the works he has been producing since 1962. Two retrospective exhibitions were held at one of the most important art institutions in Toronto, the Power Plant, in 1994 and 2009 showing a collection of the artist’s works. The artist, whose works have been on show at the most prestigious institutions and organizations in art, represented his country at the Canadian pavilion in the Venice Biennial of 1970.
Snow has also participated in biennials such as Sydney, Sao Paulo and Whitney. His works were exhibited at the Hara Museum in Tokyo in 1988; at Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1999; at Centre de la Photographie in Paris in 2000; at the Georges Pompidou Culture Centre in 2003, and at UQAM in Montreal in 2005.
Snow’s works consist of cutting, stretching, transforming, obscuring differences, distorting the form, jolting and rendering things figureless.
Notion of time
According to Ali Akay, Snow is an artist focusing on the notion of “time” and creating an art of illusion through time. The problematic of Snow, who gathers a multiplicity of temporalities in his works, focuses on duration, to define it through a Bergsonian concept.
Duration in the lived experimentality of time is an irrevocable, self-determined, unrepeatable, indeterminable creative process. But Snow renders duration discontinuous through using repetitions and temporal parallelisms. So, according to the Bergsonian philosophy, this duration is a “life force” (élan vital). Here, space is not time; but from another viewpoint, time passes in space.
“In the images presented, it seems important to illustrate the changing of the duration within the will. It could be stated that difference and similarities cause a duality in the continuity and that the differences in the levels of time emerge within the continuity,” he said.
The exhibition will continue until Feb. 25. k HDN
