Temporama is a chronotropic portrait of the artist as a young woman and brings back to life works done by Dominique Gonzalez-Foersterbetween 1985 and 1991, during and soon after her art school years; many of these works are being recreated for the very first time for this exhibition. The early works are full of incipient intuitions and immature desires, exploring ideas and materials that would with time become essential to the artist’s practice: the experience of time and space, the presence of horizontality and color, and the use of carpets, books, and domestic objects as constitutive and recurring elements within the work.
Temporama creates a time zone where the different works coexist, where the past is rethought and the future reimagined. More than an exhibition,Temporama is a time machine,but also an interior park and a garden, a swimming pool and a landscape.
As part of a new work created specially for MAM Rio, Gonzalez-Foerster appears as Marilyn Monroe in the famous skinny dip scene from her unfinished last movie,Something’s Got to Give (1962), with this connecting us back to the early modern days of the museum and the mid-sixties when Gonzalez-Foerster was born.
MAM’s glass facades covered with red and blue filters become like 3-D glasses that activate the space, allowing the landscape outside to merge with the exhibition space and the art works inside, which in Temporama all become transformed through cultural, artistic, architectural, and emotional metabolization.
Operating in the space between art, cinema, architecture, and literature, most of Gonzalez-Foerster’s work in the past three decades has been concerned with the possibility of physical and mental travel through space and time as a strategy for revealing an emotional understanding of space, memory, reality, and fiction. In a similar way to how she has inhabited rooms, moments, and places, Gonzalez-Foerster has recently embodied many different characters, including Lola Montez, King Ludwig II, Edgar Allan Poe, Bob Dylan, Vera Nabokov, and Fitzcarraldo.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has exhibited all around the world since 1985. She lives between Paris and Rio de Janeiro, and her artistic thinking and practice have been deeply influenced by her experience of Rio. Since 1998 she has developed an extensive body of work related to Brazil, including four films and participations in the 2006 São Paulo Biennale and the 2013 Panorama da Arte Brasileira, both curated by Lisette Lagnado. Her site-specific installation, Desert Park (2010), is located in Inhotim, in Minas Gerais. Through her long-time conversation with Brazilian modern architecture and by showing very early works, Gonzalez-Foerster offers the opportunity to see MAM with different eyes as a setting for twentieth century experiencesand a place of origins and endless beginnings.
Pablo León de la Barra
Curator
The Swimming Pool soundtrack includes songs by Arto Lindsay, Cibelle, Miss Kittin, and Tetine. Temporama is a prelude to Gonzalez-Foerster’s retrospective taking place at Centre George Pompidou in Paris this September