UAG / Room Gallery continues its Critical Aesthetics Program, with Andrea Geyer's Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb.  Coined the “Architect of the Holocaust,” 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 continues its Emerging Artist Series with Erika Vogt’s interdisciplinary installation, Secret Traveler Navigator, which premiered at the 2010 Whitney Biennial.  The work’s main component is a film that blurs the boundaries between what Peter Wollen designated as the narrative and structuralist historical avant-gardes.  In so doing, the work begs the question: what is a narrative?  And, by extension, what is a journey?   Structurally, the film is an episodic narrative, wherein different scenes repeat similar abstract images or specific activities, while metaphorically it is also an abstract representation of a compass that’s been broken down into parts.  After the viewer has navigated their journey through these abstract and real signs, a voiceover is heard: The narrator, a man of shimmering devices, has lost his way.  To go back or forward?  Obtuse in storyline but hypnotic in visual affect, Vogt’s Secret Traveler Navigator is a mediation on what Hollis Frampton asked at the height of 60’s experimental film: What are the irreducible axioms of that part of thought we call the art of film?  This remains a pertinent question in contemporary art, one to which we can neither simply return nor abandon.  
Curated by Juli Carson.

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