UAG / Room Gallery continues its Critical Aesthetics Program, this year with Andrea Geyer’s Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb. Coined the “Architect of the Holocaust,” Opening Reception Thursday, September 30, 6-9 pm September 30 – November 20, 2010
Adolf Eichmann’s death sentence was executed on May 31, 1962 after his historic trial in a Jerusalem Court. Over the course of this trial, the courtroom in Jerusalem became a worldwide stage for a multitude of struggles for justice, truth, history and the sovereignty of a young nation.
The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about these trials and later published her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a volume that infamously posited the philosophical paradox: the banality of evil.
Some 40 years later, the mid-career German artist Andrea Geyer has conceived an artwork related to these trials called: Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, which the UAG will mount in Fall, 2010. Across 6 monitors arranged in a circle around the viewers, this work shows an abstracted trial set in an archive, featuring six characters: Accused, Defense, Judge, Prosecution, Reporter, Audience. Based on the transcripts of the actual trial as well as the writings of Hannah Arendt, the characters re-enact not so much the trial but its historical trace in the present. An acknowledgment of history’s force as repetition, Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb thus asks us to address our responsibility for this history today.
Curated by Juli Carson
Room Gallery University of California, Irvine ACT rm. 1200 Irvine, CA 92697-2775
studioart.arts.uci.edu
