the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Silvia Kolbowski

After Hiroshima Mon Amour

This lecture took place on February 23rd, 2009 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Developed over a three-year period (2005-2008), After Hiroshima Mon Amour is a 22-minute video/film that looks through the lens of the celebrated 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour (directed by Alain Resnais;written by Marguerite Duras) at sites of American incursion and neglect - Iraq and New Orleans.  After Hiroshima Mon Amour uses various visual and aural strategies to layer and analyze past and present instances of violence and trauma. Titles, silence, color, brief sync sound, and music are used to create a new story out of an old one. The allegorical couple of the 1959 film is played by ten interconnecting actors who blur the categories of ethnicity, race, and gender. Various scenes in black and white are faithfully recreated from the 1959 film, contemporary material downloaded from the internet is included, and a remix of the score and sound design of the Resnais/Duras film becomes a “character” in the video.

About Silvia Kolbowski

Silvia Kolbowski is an artist based in New York. Her scope of address includes the ethics of history, memory, sexuality, and the unconscious. In 2007 she exhibited a revised version of her audio/video installation “an inadequate history of conceptual art” (1998/99) at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Her 2004 project “Proximity to Power, American Style,” a slide/audio work about the relational aspects of masculine power was published by WhiteWalls and University of Chicago Press (2008). Her most recent project, a video and photo work entitled “After Hiroshima Mon Amour,” (2008) premiered in September at LAX<>Art in Los Angeles, curated by Christopher Bedford, and will be part of a one-person exhibition at the Ellen & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, opening January 2009, and at The Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, opening in May 2009. Kolbowski’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in a 2004 one-person exhibition at the Secession, Vienna, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and The Walker Art Center. From 1993-2000 Kolbowski was a co-editor of October journal, and is currently on their advisory board. 

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