ROMAN VARIATIONS
18 Feb 2017 – 08 Apr 2017
Shot during Michel Auder’s one year residency in the Italian capital, Roman Variations (1991) is an epic film with Rome as its subject. The fifty-minute travelogue is an uncanny document of the eternal city at the dawn of the Berlusconi era.
Images of the Palatine hill under a bright blue sky or of the Campo dei Fiori market on a rainy day are alternated with erotically underpinned fragments of Italian television. Television and real life are blended as a visual of the city’s immortal skyline, and forefronted by a close up of an electrical stimulation belt wrapped around a young woman’s body.
The artist pays homage to Rome’s magnificence, chaos and decadence capturing, with his sophisticated eye, the para-doxical expressions of this complex city.
A pioneer in experimental film, Auder began in the early 1960s as a photographer and soon explored video as an artistic medium to document his life and New York’s bohemian underground. Over the years he has shot thousands of hours of film; much of this footage is edited by the artist many years after it was recorded and turned into video works ranging from sequences lasting just a few minutes to feature-length films.
Born in 1945 in Soissons, FR, Michel Auder lives and works in New York, USA. He has been a faculty member at Yale University School of Art since 2005 and was selected by the 2016 DAAD’s Berliner Künstlerprogramm’s jury for a one-year visual art residency.
SANT’ANDREA DE SCAPHIS
VIA DEI VASCELLARI 69
ROME
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