Following Anthony McCall in 2022, Rosa Barba in 2023, and Chantal Akerman in 2024, this year OFFSCREEN honors Shigeko Kubota, the renowned pioneer of video art.
Over her five-decade career, Kubota (1937-2015) was instrumental in elevating video to fine art status and pioneering the development of video sculpture. An active participant in the international Fluxus movement, Kubota forged a lyrical confluence of the personal and the technological.
Strongly influenced by—and personally acquainted with—Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Kubota’s work encompasses several interconnected themes: installations paying homage to Duchampian ideas, works referencing Japanese spiritual traditions of water and mountains, and an ongoing video chronicle of her personal life.
In “River” (1979-81), which will be featured at OFFSCREEN, Kubota wrote: “A drop of rain becomes a brook, a brook becomes a river. The role of water in nature is comparable to the function of video in our life”—embodying her vision of video as “liquid reality” where form, place, and time endlessly dissolve.
Her work is held in prestigious collections including The Museum of Modern Art New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and has been exhibited at major international venues from the Whitney Museum to Documenta and the Venice Biennale.
Shigeko Kubota is represented by Fergus McCaffrey.
“I would like the viewer to have a physical experience through the time used in each shot. To have this physical experience that time unfolds in you, that time enters you.”
Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman was born in 1950 in Brussels, and died in Paris in 2015. The major Belgian director and pioneer of feminist and experimental filmmaking is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, Paris, Los Angeles). She made over 40 films during her lifetime, and is considered to be one of the most important European directors of her generation.
Her film « La Chambre » (1972) and stills form her film « Là-bas »(2006) were presented on a dedicated floor of the Grand Garage Haussmann.
Rosa Barba is an Italian artist based in Berlin whose work explores the intersection of film, sculpture, and installation. She examines how time shapes space, often drawing from landscapes, archives, and fictional narratives. Her pieces create layered environments where memory and perception blur. She is represented by Vistamare.
OFFSCREEN has dedicated an entire level of the Grand Garage Haussmann to her work Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021). Two others pieces were presented : “Color Clock (Blue): Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints”, 2012 and “Weavers (Blue)” 2021.
Anthony McCall is a British-born artist known for his “solid-light” films — sculptural projections that transform light into spatial form. Oscillating between drawing, sculpture and moving image, his work invites the viewer into a physical, immersive encounter with time and space. He is represented by Galerie Martine Aboucaya and Galerie Thomas Zander.
On a dedicated floor of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, he exhibited a monumental and immersive work « Face to Face V », shown for the first time in France.