sergei eisenstein the mexican drawings at extra city

Sergei Eisenstein

The Mexican Drawings
03/04 – 21/06/2009

Opening: Donderdag/Thursday 02/04 19.00
In samenwerking met / in collaboration withMuHKA
Curators: Oksana Bulgakowa & Anselm Franke
Tentoonstellingsarchitectuur / Exhibition architecture: Guy Châtel (ssa/xx-architecten)
Sergei M. Eisenstein,drawing No. 4 from seriesDuncan's Death,1931 (RGALI)

Gerelateerde evenementen
Related events
Oksana Bulgakowa lezingen
3 april 15 mei om 19.00Locatie: MuHKA_media
Oksana Bulgakowa lectures
3 April 15 May at 19.00 Location: MuHKA_media

Extra City is proud to present the exhibition Sergei Eisenstein. The Mexican Drawings.
Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), the director offilms like Battleship Potemkin (1927) and Ivan the Terrible (1941), is widely acknowledged as being one of most influential artists of the modern period. Eisenstein's radical concept of montage has become seminal within the theory and practice of the Avant-garde of the 20th century. Other aspects of his work, especially his unfinished scripts, theoretical projects, and drawings, have remained less known.
Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings, organized in collaboration with MuHKA Antwerp, brings together an extensive selection of works culled from the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art in Moscow (RGALI), drawings that Eisentein made during his visit to Mexico in 1931/32, including some that have never before presented in public. In Mexico, Eisenstein developed his drawings in a parallel manner to the Surrealists' écriture automatique, producing a large number of variations on recurring motifs based on Mexico's hybrid imagery. In a single dynamic line, Eisenstein explores the transformation of forms, obscenity, death and violence.
The drawings are an integral part of his larger intellectual project, a study of the historical relationship between rationality, sensual thought and image. Eisenstein had intended to publish the results of his research in a book entitled Method, on which he worked until the end of his life, but which remained uncompleted. In an attempt to approximate Eisenstein's non-linear conception of Method, extracts from that material and partial translations will be presented in a web platform established on the occasion of the exhibition.
The exhibition will further include short excerpts from the unfinished ¡Que viva México!, the film Eisenstein was in the process of producing in Mexico, and which he would tragically be excluded from editing.
The exhibition Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings is conceived as an introduction to the collaborative project Animism, planned to take place in 2010 at MuHKA and Extra City, which addresses the dialectics of subjectification and objectification, conservation and animation, in modern and contemporary art.
With the support of the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art and the Ford Foundation, Moscow.