Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Black Box: Mircea Cantor
September 17, 2007 – December 9, 2007
The Black Box Theater showcases rotating exhibitions of contemporary artists who use film or video as their creative medium. Films or videos run continuously.
Mircea Cantor (Romanian, born 1977, lives and works in Paris) left Romania soon after its borders opened in the early 1990s. Hitchhiking across Europe, he led an itinerant life that duplicated the curiosity with which Cantor explores artistic genres and pokes at conventions.
See films by Mircea Cantor, including Deeparture (2005), a film that recorded a suspenseful dance between a wolf and a deer trapped in a small gallery space—a piece that calls to mind Joseph Beuys's 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the artist locked himself up with a coyote at the Rene Block Gallery in New York for a week. Cantor's short piece is a disturbingly silent examination of ideas about nature and dominance played in a time-distorting loop.
