Thursday nights in September, gather at the Walker Art Center to hear from artists, curators, directors, and other voices at events throughout the building. See the opening films of a thrilling fall lineup in the Walker Cinema and engage with the newly-installed exhibitions I am you, you are too and Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle.
Get inspired. Get in free. Gallery admission is free from 5 to 9 pm every Thursday night.
Upcoming Target Free Thursday Night Events:
View of the exhibition Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle at S.M.A.K. Ghent, 2016-2017 (Photograph: Timo Ohler)
Opening-Day Talk: Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle
September 7, 6:00 pm
Gallery 4
Free
Join curator Vincenzo de Bellis for a walk-through of the new exhibition.
Over the past two decades, Nairy Baghramian has created sculptures, photographic works, and drawings that explore relationships between architecture and the human body. Her works mark boundaries, transitions, and gaps in the museum, prompting us to consider form and meaning in the context of interior and exterior spaces. Drawing on a multiplicity of references–including dance, theater, design, and fashion–and producing unlikely juxtapositions in material and scale, the artist questions and challenges the definition of sculpture. Through her playful yet critical take on the artist survey, Baghramian unpacks and interrogates the conceptual, physical, and social aspects of sculpture-making today.
Robert Longo, National Trust, 1981 (Courtesy Walker Art Center; © Robert Longo)
Opening Day: I am you, you are too
September 7, 5:00 pm
Galleries 1, 2, 3, and D/Perlman Gallery
Free
At a time of heightened uncertainty, division, and geopolitical tensions, I am you, you are too foregrounds works from the Walker’s collections that explore contemporary life through themes of citizenship and belonging, borders and barriers, and ways in which everyday life informs our understanding of ourselves. Bringing together a diverse, multigenerational, and international group of artists, the exhibition questions how we memorialize the past and understand the social, geographic, and political structures that shape us.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, Adrienne Edwards, Pavel Pyś
Petra Blaisse (Photo: courtesy Inga Powilleit)
Artist Talk: Petra Blaisse
September 7, 7:00 pm
Walker Cinema
Free (Tickets available at the Main Lobby desk from 6:00 pm)
Join Dutch designer Petra Blaisse of Inside Outside, Amsterdam, in a discussion of her work and approach to the Walker Art Center’s new Wurtele Upper Garden. Learn how Blaisse and her team transformed a sloping open field into an iconic hillside. A series of tree groves–some open, some enclosed–are arrayed across the new topography, offering views of the downtown skyline and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and providing new spaces to host Walker programs. Cohosted by Architecture MN magazine and its publisher, AIA Minnesota.
About the Artist
Petra Blaisse works in a multitude of creative areas, including textile, landscape, and exhibition design. Blaisse gained international acclaim for her innovative exhibition installations in the 1980s and 1990s. Her studio Inside Outside, which she founded in 1991, specializes in the rare combination of interior and landscape design, interweaving architecture and context and reflecting a fascination with materials, light, and movement within an urban and infrastructural program. The Amsterdam-based studio works globally on projects of increasing technical sophistication, ambition, and scale, including public parks, large-scale curtains and gardens for cultural and commercial buildings, landscape master plans, and small built structures. Throughout the years Inside Outside has collaborated with various architects and designers, including OMA, SANAA, UNStudio, Youssef Tohme Architects and Associates (YTAA), Location & Vassal, and others. Blaisse has lectured and taught extensively in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, and her award-winning work has been featured in numerous design and architecture publications and exhibits internationally.
Omer Fast, Remainder, 2015 (Photo: courtesy The Match Factory)
Remainder
September 14, 7:30 pm
Walker Cinema
Free (Tickets available at the Main Lobby desk from 6:30 pm)
“It’s all in the mind. As in Memento and Mulholland Drive before it, the function and operation of memory beguiles Remainder, an absorbing first feature from prolific Israeli video artist Omer Fast.” —Variety
A psychological thriller that goes beyond the genre’s typical mind-swirled action, Remainder tells the story of a London man’s attempt to reconstruct his identity after he is hit by an unidentified object. An adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same title, Remainder is director Omer Fast’s first feature-length film. 2015, DCP, 103 minutes.
Introduced by Yasufumi Nakamori, photography and new media curator, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Sheryl Mousley, moving image senior curator, Walker Art Center.
Erik Nelson, A Gray State, 2017 (Photo: courtesy the filmmaker)
A Gray State
September 21, 7:00 pm
Walker Cinema
Free (Tickets available at the Main Lobby desk from 6:00 pm)
Conspiracy theory spirals into deadly obsession in this documentary that trails Minnesotan veteran turned filmmaker David Crowley. In January 2015, Crowley and his family were found dead in their Apple Valley home. Their deaths caused many conspiracy theorists to surmise that the government had intervened due to the content of his in-progress film Gray State, while investigators reported murder-suicide. 2017, DCP, 93 minutes.
After this pre-release screening, join director Erik Nelson and journalist Tom Lyden of Fox 9 News for a discussion mediated by Deirdre Haj, director of Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
HIJACK Making Dances 2017 Photo courtesy Walker Art Center
HIJACK Making Dances: The Last One — Cling or Detach
September 28, 7:00 pm
Bentson Mediatheque
Free
Fearless performance duo HIJACK (Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder) return with their third and final installment of HIJACK Making Dances. Since January 2017, they have created new choreography in response to films from the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. Specializing in the unconventional, HIJACK plays with audience expectations through new interpretations of the self-select cinema.