Abstract
As the essay film and the moving image installation have both grown in popularity, essay installations have begin to appear. This chapter considers how essayistic forms have been adapted for spatial presentation in museums and galleries. My examples include the exhibition, After Year Zero, held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2013 and the three-screen film Two Meetings and a Funeral (Naeem Mohaiemen, 2017), both of which deal with the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War years, and the four-channel installation Crossings (Angela Melitopoulos, 2017), a complex essay installation emerging from the economic crisis in Greece, dealing with ancient and modern forms of slavery and indebtedness, neoliberal economics and ecological crisis. Through spatial tropes that play on geography, landscape and architecture as sites of collaboration and discussion, these discursive and essayistic works utilise the gallery as a location for intellectual reflection, an informal public sphere, more like a debating chamber than an immersive spectacle.
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Notes
- 1.
Jack Shenker, ‘“It’s Really Shocking”: UK Cities Refusing to Reveal Extent of Pseudo-Public Space,’ The Guardian, 26 September 2017. Online at https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/sep/26/its-really-shocking-uk-cities-refusing-to-reveal-extent-of-pseudo-public-space. Accessed 1 December 2018.
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Butler, A. (2019). The Essay Installation. In: Displacements. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30461-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30461-4_6
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