David Hartt

The Republic, 2014

November 10 to 15

In the early 1960s, Constantinos Doxiadis was commissioned by the Greek military Junta to develop the master plan for Athens and to bring some order to the explosive post-war growth and urbanization the city was experiencing. In 1965, he was commissioned by Detroit Edison to lead the “Developing Urban Detroit Area Research Project.” The fall of the junta in 1974 and the Detroit riots of 1967 changed the historical trajectory of both cities and neither commission was realized. Hartt’s ongoing inquiry into the ideological implications of the built environment engages a variety of media. Shot in both Athens and Detroit, the footage, set to a score by Sam Prekop, is montaged so that the locations become indiscernible and a hybrid city-state emerges. Interspersed at random moments throughout the film is a group of laborers who flip an automobile in a winter landscape as both an invocation of the myth of Sisyphus and a reenactment of civil disorder.

David Hartt (Montreal, 1967) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Selected by MOCA Toronto.

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A River Waits Reply

A screening series developed in partnership between seven international arts organizations, A River Waits Reply presents moving-image works from around the world as a poetic reply to this unprecedented year. It is a year that has invited new forms of exchange at a distance, and a long-overdue reckoning with deep social and political inequity that calls for new forms of solidarity. All seven institutions will simultaneously host each video on their websites for the duration of one week, with the series as a whole extending over seven weeks in total. Each work has been selected by a partner organisation as a response to the videos that preceded it, producing a cascading sequence and a winding river of thought, interpreted through the aesthetic and social values of their respective cultural context.

The title of the series is borrowed from a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Artists

(in order of appearance)

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz
Ria Pacquée
Miguel Calderón
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
David Hartt
Martha Atienza
Pooja Gurung & Bibhusan Basnet

Collaborators

Argos, Brussels
Gasworks, London
Kadist, SF & Paris
MOCA Toronto
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
Para Site, Hong Kong
Pivô, São Paulo