Mountain / Time - Aspen Art Museum
Mountain / Time is a major exhibition exploring ideas of re-mapping, migration, Black and Indigenous geographies, storytelling, and time, in themes inspired by the intertwined histories and geographies of the mountains and their ecological systems. The exhibition, drawn from two of the most significant collections of time-based media—the Rosenkranz Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art—brings together a group of moving image installations by Kahlil Joseph, Kandis Williams, Arthur Jafa, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Tourmaline, Anicka Yi, Ian Cheng, Maia Ruth Lee, Clarissa Tossin, Mark Leckey, Doug Aitken, and Alan Michelson.
The works in the exhibition explore re-mapping as a form of place-making through archival research, collage, science fiction, language, dance, and music, in conceptualizations of time and knowledge that both excavate the past and re-imagine the future. Some works are filmed in the Amazon rainforest, the Himalayas, the forests of North East Thailand, and the American West; others construct new choreographies and cinematic narratives in the studio, or in the immaterial worlds of digital space.
These non-linear models resemble the ancient Pando root system of the Aspen forest, one of the world’s oldest single living organisms, whose rhizomatic structure has no beginning, end, or center, and can be entered at many different points, building multiple layers of support and connectivity. The immersive temporality in Mountain / Time is similarly generative, allowing different forms of storytelling to resonate with each other, creating new maps of thinking and world-making.
Curated by Chrissie Iles, Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Anisa Jackson, Curator at Large, and Simone Krug, Assistant Curator, Aspen Art Museum.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of special events and screenings, including a performance of Itinerant Cinema by Korakrit Arunanonchai and Alex Gvojic in an Aspen grove on August 3rd, and a program of film screenings in Smuggler Mine, an abandoned silver mine on the mountain, curated by Anisa Jackson.
The Aspen Art Museum is also collaborating with TACAW and Crystal Cinema in Carbondale, presenting film screenings curated by film curator and scholar Michael Gillespie, and others.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Cauleen Smith will take up a two-week residency at Anderson Ranch, in collaboration with the Aspen Art Museum, where she will have the opportunity to research the geology and ecology of the valley.
Scholarly discussions around the moving image in art will take place during the exhibition, building on Aspen’s deep history of cultural and intellectual scholarship within the framework of the Aspen Art Museum and its developing role as a cultural think tank.