Performance on Film: Eichterling PREMIERE, Holzer, Rottenberg & Sherald

We are excited to present a new summer film series dedicated to ‘Performance on Film’ at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street.

Celebrating a long tradition of Hauser & Wirth artists working in performance, the series will comprise selected works by artists represented by the gallery, as well as documentation from various past performances at Hauser & Wirth’s New York and Los Angeles locations and two world premieres from artists outside the gallery’s roster.

Screenings will take place over two weeks this summer, Thursday 11 July to Wednesday 17 July. All screenings are free and open to the public; however, due to limited space, reservations are required.

All screenings are free and open to the public; however, due to limited space, reservations are required. Please register for each film individually.

Friday 12 July
7.30 pm

AMOC
in response to ‘DEMENTED WORDS Jenny Holzer’
25 min

‘IT COULD’VE BEEN ME…IT COULD BE ME’
David Adrian Freeland Jr. in response to Amy Sherald
15 min

‘BOWLS BALLS SOULS HOLES’
Mika Rottenberg
27 min

WORLD PREMIERE: ‘TRUE LOVE WILL FIND YOU IN THE END’
by EICHTERLING (Julia Eichten & Bret Easterling)
25 min

About AMOC’s response to ‘DEMENTED WORDS. Jenny Holzer’
Spanning the entire first floor of the gallery’s 22nd Street location, ">span> presented a powerhouse lineup of performers in response to Jenny Holzer’s 2022 exhibition ‘DEMENTED WORDS’. The company created an immersive concert experience around the works, engaging with the artist's unique ability to harness the power of words.

The performance includes traditional spirituals and rearranged early Baroque compositions, featuring interpolated text from Jenny Holzer, conceived by Zack Winokur and company: Anthony Roth Costanzo, Countertenor; Keir GoGwilt, Violin; Coleman Itzkoff, Cello; Davóne Tines, Bass-baritone; Sae Hashimoto, Percussion. And featuring ‘Nobody Knows’ Traditional, arranged by Davóne Tines. ‘Ah Belinda’ Henry Purcell, arranged by Celeste Oram and company. Text from ‘Truisms’ by Jenny Holzer, ‘Flow My Tears’ John Dowland, arranged by Celeste Oram and company. Text by Dowland and QAnon.

About David Adrian Freeland Jr.’s ‘It Could’ve Been Me…It Could Be Me’
Created during the uprisings of 2020 against police brutality and the killings of unarmed Black Americans, this timely and resonant performance is set to Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed’ recorded in 2016 by University of Michigan Men's Glee Club. ‘In the spring and summer of 2020, we continued to see the lives of Black people ended at the hands of police and a racist system. As I read the articles and saw the videos, I grew angry and tired. I was scrolling through social media one day and I happened upon a video of a choir singing Joel Thompson’s ‘’">span>’ I was immediately moved to tears but even more inspired to dance. When I shared this work on social media, it was a much-needed release for me. I was angry, hurt, tired, and uninspired to do anything artistic, so setting up my camera and letting the music move me helped me share those feelings. This work is not about me. But it could’ve been me…it could still be me at any moment. And that’s the hardest truth of it all.’—

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About EICHTERLING's ‘True Love Will Find You In The End’
Made by ,">span>, a creative partnership born out of the more than a decade long friendship and collaboration between dancers ">span> and artists,">span>, TRUE LOVE WILL FIND YOU IN THE END is a poetic experiment about fate and inevitability that references an array of dance practices and choreographic legacies. A collection of vignettes, the film follows two beings in states of ongoing, radical transformation who sift through recognizable languages of dance and movement, tracing the sometimes forgotten or lost histories of dance. Shot in locations across Los Angeles including a farmhouse in Malibu, an industrial warehouse in the Arts District, and a laundromat in Westlake, the film explores the continuity of reciprocity and affection even as the boundaries between human and animal, real and virtual, and fact and fiction dissolve. Produced by ">span> and .

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About Mika Rottenberg's 'Bowls Balls Souls Holes'
‘This piece spins around relationships between the physical and metaphysical. Rooms become characters, the bingo balls become electrons bouncing, the clothespin guy is the conductor, the sleeping moon lady is a vessel and the announcer is the gatekeeper. They all affect temperature and move architecture. Internal psychological space extends beyond the body’s border, shaping the exterior by using parapsychology.

Cause and effect, as a basic mode of progression, has been a main interest for me from a psychological, sculptural and social perspective. In this piece, I address this idea less in a physical direction and more in an abstract direction, extending it to the metaphysical and to processes that are not necessarily visible, like the production of luck or the loaded phenomenon of global warming. You can’t really see how these things work—both are cause and effect relationships that are abstract. Weirdly, I find that it’s easier to believe in your ability to influence luck than to see how you play your part in climate change. I use cinema as a tool to make viewers believe in an immaterial chain of cause and effect. Cinema allows that type of deception, so the production of luck becomes real and glaciers melting into a bingo hall become real.

I also use cinematic structures to manipulate space from a sculptural perspective. When making ‘Bowls Balls Souls Holes,’ I was drawn to a bingo hall in Harlem that seems to me like it is its own little universe. You hardly notice the sign when you walk on 125th Street, but once you enter you discover all these people playing for hours. They seem to function in a different time and according to the rhythm of the random numbers being called: I-20, O-72, B-12, etc. What if these numbers are some kind of code and the people are not playing bingo? What if the numbers actually write a sequence that opens a wormhole into another dimension, where cause and effect rely on laws different from the laws of physics?’— ,">span>, in conversation with Christopher Bedford for the Rose Art Museum exhibition catalogue 'Mika Rottenberg: The Production of Luck' (2014)

Image 1: 'True Love Will Find You In The End', 2024 (film still). ©️ EICHTERLING (Julia Eichten & Bret Easterling)
Image 2: Film Still. In Performance: American Modern Opera Company responds to ‘DEMENTED WORDS Jenny Holzer’
Image 3: Film Still. ‘It Could’ve Been Me…It Could Be Me’ Choreographed & performed by David Adrian Freeland Jr. Presented by Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, in partnership with L.A. Dance Project Director of Photography Trevor Tweeten. Audio recording by University of Michigan Men's Glee Club, 2016 Eugene Rogers, Conductor
Image 4: Mika Rottenberg, ‘Bowls Balls Souls Holes’ (video still), 2014 © Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy the artist