Conceived in 2022, Alex Da Corte’s ROY G BIV is both a video installation and an ongoing performance. The video set recreates a gallery in the Philadelphia Museum of Art—the artist’s hometown museum—that houses sculptures by Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957). Da Corte plays four characters in the video: the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968); Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy; Duchamp dressed as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman; and one of two figures in Brancusi’s sculpture The Kiss(1916), who comes to life via stop-motion animation. The accumulation of color and eventual emancipation of The Kiss is central to this story of love, loss, and transformation.
Behind the evening tide presents a selection of works by artist Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians (Wisconsin, USA). Hopinka is a photographer, poet, and experimental filmmaker who investigates the sites and landscapes of the United States that are steeped in history, the multiplicity of languages, and myths from subjective perspectives rooted in indigenous cultures. For his first exhibition in Switzerland, two sequences of three short films are screened, alongside with a calligram that reveals the specificity of his work from the notion of ethnopoetry. In contrast to an objectifying study on contemporary Amerindian life, Hopinka operates at the crossroads of poetry and ethnography. Excerpted from a poem, the title of the exhibition Behind the evening tide invites to bring invisible forms to light in a contemplative and meditative gesture.