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FLORENCE

Beryl Korot

2009 00:10:31 United StatesColorStereo4:3DV video
Tags:
History, Memory, Poetry

Description

I sit at my computer cutting up real time footage of waterfalls, snow storms, boiling water. I combine these to make threads of moving images. I look and listen to the result in front of me and I think of people whose actions transcend fear—not in a momentary instinctual way—but over a sustained period of time. The name Florence Nightingale comes to mind, a woman whose name has become a cliche but of whom I know so little. I order books of her writings from Amazon and select phrases spread over hundreds of pages to make a soliloquy or poem. We collaborate. Words float vertically down the screen with its own position, transparency and speed. A slow sense of reading, time and sound unfolds.

Florence, born in 1820, intensely rejects her upper-class English background to seek a life of meaning and purpose apart from that designated by birth. At thirty-four, she sets off with a ragtag group of women to save men outside of Istanbul during the brutal Crimean War and transforms what had been complete neglect on the battlefield into a system of caring for the wounded. The year is 1854.

About Beryl Korot

Beryl Korot is a pioneer of video art, and of multiple channel work in particular. By applying specific structures inherent to loom programming to the programming of multiple channels she brought the ancient and modern worlds of technology into conversation. This extended to a body of work on handwoven canvas in an original language based on the grid structure of woven cloth and to a series of paintings on canvas based on this language. She co-founded and edited Radical Software, the first publication to focus on the potentials of video as an art form (1970-74) and tool for social change.

More recently she has created drawings which combine ink, pencil, and digitized threads, as well as large scale “tapestries” where threads are printed on paper and woven.

Two early multiple channel works—Dachau 1974 and Text and Commentary—have been installed in exhibitions on both the history of video art and textiles. Her works have been seen at the Whitney Museum (1980, 1993, 2000, 2002); the Kitchen, New York, NY (1975); Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, NY (1977); Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977);  the John Weber Gallery, NYC (1986); the Köln and Düsseldorf Kunstvereins (1989 and 1994); the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (1990); the Reina Sofia, Madrid, (1994); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2010); bitforms gallery, New York, NY (2012/2018); the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, England (2013); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2013); Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2014), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2014); Tate Modern, London, England (2014); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2015); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, ICI Project 35, Moscow, Russia (2015/16), SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2016), Santa Fe Thoma Art House (2017), LOOP festival, Santa Agata Capella, Barcelona (2017), ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2017-18); Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2017-18); Documenta Politik und Kunst, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin (2021/22); Core Memory, Newcomb Museum (2022); Key Operators, Kunstverein Munchen, Fall, 2024; Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2025), amongst others.

Two video/music collaborations with Steve Reich—The Cave (1993) and Three Tales (2002)—brought video installation art into a theatrical context and have been performed worldwide since 1993. Both works continue to be performed and were exhibited as video installations at venues including the Whitney Museum, NYC, NY (1993); the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, (1994); the Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (1994) , the Kunstverein, Düsseldorf, Germany (1994); Historisches Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2000), ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2008.