Feb 24th 2011

In her striking, cerebral videos, installations, and photographs, German-born, New York-based artist Andrea Geyer mixes documentary and fiction to examine the ways historical narratives and social spaces shift over time and within larger socio-political contexts. Featured in tonight’s program is Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb (2009-10), which reenacts the 1961-62 trial of notorious Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Based on both court transcripts and Hannah Arendt’s book on the trial (Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil), Geyer’s video abstracts the trial into six equally distinct roles — Accused, Defense, Judge, Prosecution, Reporter, and Audience — all performed by the same actor, artist (and SAIC alumnus) Wu Ingrid Tsang. Together, these fractions explore the trial’s lasting relevance. Geyer, writes art historian Johanna Burton, “opens up whole pockets of forgotten history and, in so doing, remobilizes calcified, regulated understandings.”

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