A Trip to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon is an exhibition on contemporary art’s relationship to film, and part of a series of exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall that explore exchanges between contemporary art and closely related art forms like theater and literature. The title refers to film pioneer George Méliès’s 1902 science fiction film of the same name—a whimsical fantasy about the technology of the future from the earliest days of cinema. It provides the starting point for an exhibition in which ten contemporary artists play with film and its history in combination with a selection of historical footnotes.

New digital techniques inevitably result in older film formats ending up in the graveyard of the obsolete and the superfluous. This means the loss of a certain way of seeing, of a way of making pictures, and of a particular feeling created by a technique. How those shift, those births and deaths in the history of moving image, influence and change art is a major theme of the exhibition. A parallel theme of the exhibition includes artwork that looks closely at how the history of film forms our way of envisioning the world and creates our secondary selves. Artists such as Douglas Gordon, Ryan Trecartin, Ming Wong and Alex Reynolds reuse and recast film narrative techniques, camera movements and characters originating from masters like Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman, as well as the wider context of the Hollywood star system and TV’s celebrity culture.

The love affair between art and film started the moment the film camera was invented. In order to explore the relationship that has always existed between art and film, we place the modern exhibition pieces alongside a number of historical films by, in addition to George Méliès, Dara Birnbaum, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Schwartz, and Dziga Vertov.

The exhibition will be followed by a new anthology, A Trip to the Moon, with contributions by the artists in the exhibition and writers like Sara Arrhenius, Christiane Paul, Don DeLillo, Jan Holmberg, and Gene Youngblood. Release date March 9.

A Trip to the Moon
Kuratoren: Sara Arrhenius, Björn Norberg, Camilla Larsson, Caroline Elgh

Künstler: Rosa Barba, Marco Brambilla, Dara Birnbaum, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Gordon, Georges Melies, Alex Reynolds , Lindsay Seers, Lillian Schwartz, Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, Dziga Vertov, Ming Wong