Exhibition

  • A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood
    Zoe Beloff
    Artist
    Katherine Carl
    Curator
    James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
    Sep 03, 2015 to Nov 21, 2015
  • GRANTEE
    Zoe Beloff
    GRANT YEAR
    2015

Zoe Beloff, view of A World Redrawn, James Gallery, 2015, New York.

A World Redrawn is an installation incorporating films, drawings, and architectural models. It is based on ideas for films proposed, but never realized by Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht during the period in which they lived in Los Angeles. Both artists attempted the impossible: to challenge the formulas of the film industry and create works that were popular and radical. Their scenarios revolved around specific architectural structures, and both were a call for social change. Eisenstein's The Glass House (1930) is dystopian vision of modernist glass architecture as a world of total surveillance. Brecht's A Model Family in a Modern Home (1941) critiques the marketing of the prefabricated "dream" home. A World Redrawn explores these artists' original ideas and their relevance today.

Zoe Beloff holds an MA in painting and art history from Edinburgh University and an MFA in film production from Columbia University. Beloff works with a wide range of media, including film, projection performance, installation, and drawing. She considers herself an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Each project aims to connect the present to past, so that it might illuminate the future in new ways. Her work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions and screenings; venues include the Whitney Museum, the MHKA museum in Antwerp, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and Freud's Dream Museum in St. Petersburg. She has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is professor in the Departments of Media Studies and Art at Queens College, CUNY.