Anna Bella Geiger: Here is the Center

MODA Curates is an annual opportunity offered by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies program (MODA) for outstanding curatorial proposals related to students’ theses. The sixth iteration of this series is presented for the first time alongside the First-Year MFA Exhibition, in the spacious new Wallach Art Gallery at the Lenfest Center for the Arts. It features two exhibitions exploring pioneering, experimental artistic practices.

The focused survey Anna Bella Geiger: Here is the Center presents a selection of sixteen videos, prints, and photographs created by the Brazilian conceptual artist and video art innovator Anna Bella Geiger during the 1970s. Deriving its title from her 1974 photoetching Aqui é o centro, the exhibition orients Geiger’s output from this decade around her sustained interest in the motif of the center, underscoring, in particular, her use of experimental media to address the dominant paradigms that structure knowledge, experience, and culture. 

INSTALLATION VIEWS

In works that playfully deconstruct maps, shift between perspectives, and plot public sites of contestation, Geiger conceives of the center as fluid, characterized by—as she wrote in a text accompanying a 1972 presentation of her work—its ability to shift “from the inside to the outside.” As such, the inclusion of the deictic word “here,” which changes meaning depending on its context, in the exhibition title Here is the Center is emblematic of this concept of the unstable, and unfixed, central position.

Anna Bella Geiger (b. Rio de Janeiro, 1933) studied linguistics and Anglo-Germanic language and literature in Brazil, and sociology and art history at New York University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, such as Espai de Lectura 1: Brasil at MACBA, Barcelona, in 2009; Modern Women: Single Channel at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2011; Video Vintáge at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2012; and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2017. Geiger’s major solo exhibitions include Projects: Videos XXI at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1978; On a Certain Piece of Land at Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, in 2005; and Physical and Human Geography at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, in 2017. She represented Brazil in the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980 and received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. Her work is part of important museum collections such as MACBA, Barcelona; the Getty, Los Angeles; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.