Post-Revolutionary Selections from the Powel House Moving Image Archive, 1888-2089

2010, HD video installation with sound

…To be perfectly straightforward: the Powel House has no moving image archive, and the state of this archive in 2089 is obviously still to be determined. Yet by using this museological structure as a critical lens, Hironaka and Suib productively complicate the role the site is asked to play. Presented as a quasi-futuristic meta-museum, the exhibition repositions the structure as a site of multiple possibilities, and both plausible and implausible visions. The exhibition takes as its ostensible starting point 1888, the year in which inventor Louis Le Prince created Roundhay Garden Scene–the oldest surviving motion picture. Beginning with a touchstone moment in cinematic history and extrapolating into the unknown future of 2089, the four videos in the exhibition–each in a different room–act as skewed mirrors of the products of historical interpretation.

-Robert Wuilfe, curator