“COULD THIS BE ART”
2011 · Three-channel slide projection · 240 slides
“Could This Be Art” takes its title from inscriptions on four cans of 16mm film purchased at a thrift shop in Berkeley, California, in early 2010. The films contain fragments of an unfinished documentary about an American band that emerged on New York’s pop, punk and new wave scene in the late 1970s.
After filming, the director disappeared with the footage and was never heard from again. The work traces the outline of her disappearance alongside the rediscovery of the film cans, bringing together two stories in which the end of one becomes the beginning of the other.
Through these intersecting histories, the work considers memory as a selective process. Preserving certain images and stories also produces zones of forgetting, leaving other experiences outside the account. The rediscovered films become an opening into a history whose surviving fragments carry both the possibility of recollection and the losses through which it takes shape.
