The Dream Commission:
'Lineage for a Phantom Zone'
Sondra Perry, 2022
POSITION
Producer
LOCATION
Touring Fondation Beyeler,
Basel,
Venice Biennale,
The Shed, NYC and Serpentine,
London
DATES
2021-22
'Lineage for a Phantom Zone' is an immersive video installation by American moving-image artist Sondra Perry which will launch at Art Basel in 2021, before being exhibited at Foundation Beyeler, Basel in Spring 2022 and Serpentine Galleries, London in Autumn 2022. The work comprises film, sculptural pieces and a performative element as well as an artist book, the installation will be presented site-specifically in each new location.
Perry's short-form artwork, with which she won The Dream Commission, is viewable on the Serpentine Galleries website here. Taking psychoanalysis of dreams and their role as a gateway to the subconscious as a point of departure, this work creates a “dream space” in which Perry's family stories are able to be passed down across several generations through images and video. However, like in many of Perry’s works, the personal becomes a way to open up universal questions regarding the fragmented and invented nature of memory, how life experience affects what we can dream of, and questions around whose sites of family history are preserved or destroyed.
'Lineage' is not only a work about creating connections between past and present, but also about the importance of proximity, given the past 18 months of social distancing. In Perry's short-form film, the solitude of the theremin player jars with footage of communal activities -- dancing, going to church, doing hair -- while the glitch dissolves images into one another, bridging the sociality of the past with the isolation of the present. The installation of Perry's final work will safely draw together audience members in an intimate experience, transporting them into an alternative time and space conjured from Perry's own memories.
Perry was selected by a jury of leading art world figures: artistic director of Serpentine Galleries Hans Ulrich Obrist; chief curator at Fondation Beyeler Theodora Vischer; former director of the Parrish Art Museum Terrie Sultan; director of the Australian Centre for the Moving Images Katrina Sedgwick and British installation artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien.