04 Sep 2015

Bard College at Simon's Rock: Film Screening & Exhibition Opening

Walking the Sea, an exhibition and film screening by New York-based artist and filmmaker Anton Ginzburg opens Thursday, September 10, at 5:00 p.m. in the Daniel Arts Center at Bard College at Simon's Rock. A 30-minute film screening and Q&A with the artist will be held at the McConnell Theater, followed by an artist's reception in the Hillman-Jackson Gallery. Ginzburg's Walking the Sea is a body of work in film, photography, sculpture, and textile around historical and cultural conceptions of post-Soviet landscapes.

The exhibition will be on view from Thursday, September 10 through Tuesday, December 15. The gallery is open to the public weekdays from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and weekends from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. while the college is in session. This event is free and open to the public.

In his film Walking the Sea, Ginzburg literally and metaphorically crosses the Aral Sea - an inland salt-water sea that lies between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Drawing on the tradition of American Land Art from the late sixties and early seventies, Ginzburg approaches the waterless sea as a ready-made earthwork in order to make visible a territory, history, and a potential imaginary space that remains largely inaccessible. It refers to regional histories and cultural myths, ranging from the figure of the plein-air painter as a traveling dervish to the realist tradition in depicting landscape and the belief in a subterranean 'inner sea' into which the Aral Sea has disappeared.

Previously one of the four largest inland bodies of water in the world, the Aral Sea – which spans more than 26,000 square miles that are mostly dried up – has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s. Due to the Soviet irrigation project, which diverted feeder-rivers to irrigate cotton fields in the surrounding desert, this environmental devastation has led to unemployment, local climate change, and the destruction of the region's once prosperous fishing industry.

ABOUT ANTON GINZBURG
Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Ginzburg received a classical arts education before emigrating to the United States in 1990. He earned his BFA from Parsons The New School for Design, and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. His art has been shown at the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale, Blaffer Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, White Columns in New York, Lille3000 in Euralille, France, the first and second Moscow Biennales, and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. Screenings include 52nd New York Film Festival/Projections, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images/Toronto, and Les Rencontres Internationales among others. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.