Robin Graubard
infinite slide show - Paris 2020
Exhibition dates: 8 June — 8 July 2023
Office Baroque
Everdijstraat 30, 2000 Antwerp
infinite slide show - Paris 2020
Office Baroque is pleased to announce the third individual exhibition of New York based artist Robin Graubard at our gallery on Everdijstraat 30 in Antwerp.
Infinite slide show - Paris 2020, is like a time capsule of the present, an abstract documentary, containing photographs taken by Graubard in Paris in the year 2020 - the year of the global pandemic and of intense global protests. Graubard captures the dynamics of the capital. The unexpected escalation of the pandemic leaves the artist stranded in a huge and usually very busy city, which suddenly comes to a complete standstill. Graubard stays in Paris and continues to document the city’s events, both the emptied streets and the protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement among others.
The photos of Paris Fashion Week, contrasting with demonstrations and current affairs, are a constant reminder: everything is temporary; major themes of discussion, like fashion, change season after season, and the minute something fashionable is spotted, it is already a thing of the past. As Giorgio Agamben observed, in this moment of constant mismatch with the present, fashion is like modernity: what is fashionable and relevant today is created yesterday, and what will be relevant tomorrow is created today. The collision of being in the present and at the same time attempting to transcend it marks a complicated interweaving and mismatch of different times. Capturing this, infinite slide show - Paris 2020 questions the notion of chronological time and ingeniously comments on the fragmentary nature of reality in modernity and on the imprint left on contemporary society by the events of 2020.
About Robin Graubard
Robin Graubard (b. 1951) lives and works in New York City. She is a graduate of NYU Film School. Graubard’s work, over the past 40 years, has explored and blurred the boundaries between documentary and autobiographical narratives. In the 1980s, Graubard documented aspects of the Lower East Side punk scenes and the nocturnal hustle of a then still dangerous Times Square but also traveled to Eastern Europe, Jamaica and Hawai. Traveling both East and West on a political and poetical map, Graubard occupies a hard-to-define position in relation to her subjects. There remains a sense of the unresolved at play in both life and in art, a nagging sense that something is always occluded and remains unsaid. Her work builds drama through mixing up distant and conflicting realities and chronologies.
Graubard is a recipient of The Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant and has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes. Her photographs have been published by The New York Times, Paris Match, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Die Welt, UNICEF, the New York Post, and others. In 1976, Graubard produced, directed, and edited films of Talking Heads and the Ramones. Her work is included in the collections of The Bronx Museum of Fine Arts, The Whitney Museum, and others. Her work was recently featured in Greater New York (2021) at MoMA PS1, and solo exhibitions include Random Access (2019) and Take a Picture It Lasts Longer (2018) both at Office Baroque, Brussels, Jungle at JTT (2015), Incomplete at White Columns (2011) and The Doll Hospital at Anthology Film Archives (2010).
Installation image: Robin Graubard, infinite slide show, Paris 2020, video, colour
Robin Graubard, infinite slide show, Paris 2020 (still), 2020, video, colour
Installation image: Robin Graubard, infinite slide show, Paris 2020 (still), 2020, video, colour