The real double, films and text works by johan grimonprez (curated by jose ferreira, 2016)

The exhibition derives its name from the “Real Double,” the title of an essay by political philosopher and professor, Jodi Dean, in response to Johan Grimonprez’s 2009 film, Double Take.

Featuring film and text, “The Real Double” exhibition questions the notion of urban existence as the antithesis of the rural lifestyle. For generations, the concept of the “rural” has symbolized an escape from the frenzied pace of urban culture—that is, until the fast proliferation of ever changing images entered our lived space. These works, positioned within the rural bucolic setting of Anderson Ranch’s gallery, scrutinize the homogenizing tendency of various media, blurring the lines between the rural and the urban, the clone and the double.

Double Take, (Belgium/The Netherlands/Germany, 2009, 80 min)
Acclaimed director Johan Grimonprez casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. The master says all the wrong things at all the wrong times while politicians on both sides desperately clamor to say the right things, live on TV.

I May Have Lost Forever My Umbrella, (Belgium, 2011, 3 min)
In the spring of 2011, during the Photomonth in Krakow, the artist collective Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin invited Johan Grimonprez to be part of ALIAS, an exhibition with artists who inhabit alternative versions of themselves. An artist and a writer were teamed up with the aim to create a non-existent third persona. The outcome was that none of the artists in the exhibition existed, as those fictional characters took over the creative process. Grimonprez was assigned to inhabit the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.

Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter? (U.S./Belgium, 1992, 25 min)
Kobarweng reconstructs the first encounter between a remote village set in the highlands of the island of New Guinea and the outside world. Mainly told through a native narrative, it reclaims the memory of a colonial past. Switching the roles of observer and observed, it is anthropology—and specifically the desire underlying anthropological representation, that is depicted as an object of curiosity destabilized by the villager's questions.

Looking for Alfred, (Belgium/U.K./France, 2005, 10 min)
With the aid of Hitchcock impersonators, Looking for Alfred weaves an unexpected narrative from Hitchcock’s fifty-year trail of cameo appearances in his own films. Shot amongst the atmospheric interiors of the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Grimonprez’s cinematic twists and turns echo the trademark manner of the Master of Suspense while at the same time radiate a quiet and beguiling surrealism reminiscent of René Magritte.

Satin Island (Belgium/U.K./2015, 3 min)
A haunting collage of disaster and beauty, set to a shimmering track by Lights Out Asia, Johan Grimonprez in collaboration with acclaimed avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy, based on an abstract from his latest book Satin Island.