Giuliana Bruno

Traversing a varied and enchanting landscape with forays into the fields of geography, art, architecture, design, cartography and film, Giuliana Bruno's Atlas of Emotion, winner of the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz award for "the world's best book on the moving image", is a highly original endeavor to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures she emphasizes that "sight" and "site" but also "motion" and "emotion" are irrevocably connected. In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Messagem: the film-making of Peter Greenaway and Michaelangelo Antonioni; the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, and on her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film

Atlas of Emotion

An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime.

Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari

Streetwalking on a Ruined Map

Architecture and the Visual Arts (Writing Architecture)

Public Intimacy

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.

Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media

Surface

Nancy Spector

Germano Celant

Katharina Schmidt

Rebecca Horn

Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment. Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their “environmentality” produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.

Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

Atmospheres of Projection

Joan Jonas

Elisabeth Lebovici

Rosa Barba

Manuel Borja-Villel

"Rosa Barba's work is grounded in a careful exploration of the materiality, the devices, the production conditions, and the grammar of cinema. The monograph From Source to Poem is an entrancing account of the main motives that drive the artist's practice, underscoring the context in which the artworks are presented at both architectural and conceptual levels. Besides numerous films, sculptures, and works composed of light, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, and other recent exhibition venues, also features the new 35mm film From Source to Poem from 2016 for the first time in Italy. Hundreds of images from historical archives in the United States evolve into a kind of collage of the cultural legacy of a Western civilization in the twentieth century. "I would like," says Barba, "to continue to explore the geographies that we create around us.""--Publisher description.

From Source to Poem

An award-winning cultural history of how we experience the world through art, film and architecture Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavor to map the cultural terrain of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative blend of words and pictures, Giuliana Bruno emphasizes the connections between “sight” and “site” and “motion” and “emotion.” In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Louise Bourgeois, the filmmaking of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni, media archaeology and the origins of the museum, and her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno’s book opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "inferential walks" through Italian culture in the first decades of this century. This innovative approach---the interweaving of examples of cinema with architecture, art history, medical discourse, photography, and literature--addresses the challenge posed by feminism to film study while calling attention to marginalized artists. An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime. Since only fragments of Notari's films exist today, Bruno illuminates the filmmaker's contributions to early Italian cinematography by evoking the cultural terrain in which she operated. What emerges is an intertextual montage of urban film culture highlighting a woman's view on love, violence, poverty, desire, and death. This panorama ranges from the city's exteriors to the body's interiors. Reclaiming an alternative history of women's filmmaking and reception, Bruno draws a cultural history that persuasively argues for a spatial, corporal interpretation of film language.

Chantal Akerman

Dieter Roelstraete

The M HKA is holding the very first large-scale retrospective of the Belgian film-maker and artist Chantal Akerman, who has now lived in Paris for many years. It is also the first time her work has been shown in Belgium since her exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels in 1995. Akerman is one of the most influential film-makers of her generation and has long been a feminist icon. She was able to establish this reputation with her early masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Since the mid-nineties, however, she has also been increasingly active as an artist, and her film and video installations have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Documenta 11 and elsewhere. The exhibition at the M HKA will focus mainly on this latter aspect of her work and will be accompanied by an ambitious monograph.

Too Far, Too Close

Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen

Chantal Akerman - Too Far, Too Close

Mary Horlock

A Free and Anonymous Monument

Jane and Louise Wilson

Maria Nadotti

This feminist anthology from Italy offers an enriching perspective on cinema studies. Focusing on women’s engagement with political theory and film-making, the book never loses sight of the female experience of cinema. It examines how women have chosen to represent themselves and how they have been represented, and how they deal with the cinematic apparatus, as subjects of production, objects of representation, and spectators. A variety of approaches are offered, ranging from psychoanalysis and semiology to history. With an exhaustive filmography, this anthology of chapters by eminent theorists demonstrates the central importance of recent developments in Italy for the whole spectrum of film and feminist studies.

Women and Film in Italy: Seminar on Italian and American directions

Off Screen

Paul Gilroy

Isaac Julien

Cynthia Rose

'Riot' is an intellectual and professional autobiography of the British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, whose trail-blazing career has moved through forms of documentary, biography, dance, narrative film, and multiscreen installation. Both visually sensuous and politically and socially engaged, Julien's films draw on influence as disparate as silent cinema, cultural studies, news stories, Chinese myth and popular music.

Giuliana Bruno

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