Catherine Sullivan’s Video Installation at Catherine Bastide Gallery

During Brussels Art Days – 11 to 13 September – Catherine Bastide Gallery will open the season with the American artist Catherine Sullivan and her exhibition “Afterwood via Fantasia” in collaboration with Georges Lewis, Charles Gaines and Sean Griffin.

Catherine Sullivan is currently working on a new video piece consisting in a 20-minute installation that can also be presented as a single-channel 40-minute projection. This video, “Afterword via Fantasia”, has been shot on some already-existing sets for plays or operas such as Porgy & Bess or Waiting For Godot, performed by all African-American casts. This video exists in parallel to an experimental opera Sullivan is collaborating on with composer and music historian George Lewis and composer and scenographer Sean Griffin. The opera is a commission from the MCA Chicago, where it will premiere in October 2015. As with most work by Sullivan, the narrative uses repetition of characters, movement, and in some cases texts. In this specific project the scenes rotation is conceived to create interest for viewers watching the piece for various length of times. The existing sets used for the video were previously used for plays centered on the experience of African-American artists, in which the action is set in the same time frame as the opera, with the exception of Godot, for which the set was used by an all African-American cast and an African-American director. The final scenes in the video concentrate on the social, political and cultural realities AACM is currently confronted with, and on a universal and positive aspect, the importance of artistic creativity.