Private View: Carolee Schneemann, "More Wrong Things"

Hales Gallery is delighted to announce More Wrong Things, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Carolee Schneemann. The exhibition at Hales London preceeds Kinetic Painting, a comprehensive retrospective of Schneemann's works opening at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt on 31 May 2017 and subsequently travelling to New York's MoMA PS1 in Fall 2017.

For over five decades – from her groundbreaking anti-Vietnam war film Viet-Flakes (1965), featured in the 1967 performance Snows, to her current work on the ongoing conflict in Syria – Carolee Schneemann’s art has unwaveringly borne witness to the realities of war and suffering. In Schneemann’s own words, referring to the political landscape of the 1960s:

"We were being moved, we were being affected by images bringing information that was startling and taboo and terrible and made you convinced you had to do something. To enter the image itself! Activation as an intervention into the politics behind the revelatory images."
1977 Interview with Katie Haug, repr. in Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (MIT Press: 2001)

More Wrong Things at Hales London brings together works by Schneemann that take on this task, of activating the ‘revelatory’ images which emerge from sites of conflict and tragic events. Through video installation, photography and painting, Schneemann explores the invasion and devastation of Lebanon in the 1980s, the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and a range of other personal and public disasters. What unites each of these works is not just the visual motive – representations of the atrocities of war – but also the deeply personal, even intimate, nature of Schneemann’s eulogies and laments. Whilst global suffering often seems remote or incomprehensible, Schneemann’s work reveals the shared and personal dimensions of grief, embracing our collective humanity.

More information: http://www.halesgallery.com/exhibitions/101/installation_shots/