Events

Erika Balsom, A Cinematic Bayreuth: Gregory Markopoulos and the Temenos

15 June 2015
5.45–7.15pm

Yudowitz Seminar Room, Wolfson Medical Building, University of Glasgow

Erika Balsom’s talk will use the figure of Gregory Markopoulos and his dream of the Temenos to consider ideas of site-specificity and circulation in the history of artists’ moving image.

With the Temenos, Markopoulos rejected an engagement with mass distribution in favour of absolute control over the work and its conditions of exhibition, resulting in his decision to only screen the work in a field outside the town of Lyssaraia, in Greece.

Drawing on research of Markopoulos’s unpublished correspondence, Balsom’s presentation will explore the history of this ambitious and ongoing project, from its conception in the late 1960s to its posthumous continuation by Markopoulos’s longtime partner, filmmaker Robert Beavers.

Erika Balsom’s research is broadly concerned with the intersection of moving image art and the transformations of cinema after digitisation. Her monograph, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art confronts the changing contours of what we call cinema’ after digitisation through an examination of uses of the moving image and references to film history in art since 1990.

Presented by University of Glasgow, the Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow) and LUX Scotland as part of GoMA’s Ripples on the Pond exhibition.