Victory Over the Sun and a Road Not Taken

Artist: John Milner / Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller

Curated by Fiona Parry

Wednesday 18 May 2011 to Wednesday 25 May 2011

Cubitt presents two events to coincide with Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller’s exhibition Spaghetti Junctions:

Victory over the Sun

A lecture by art historian and curator Professor John Milner

Thursday 19 May, 7pm

The bizarre Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun ran for two nights at St Petersburg in December 1913, alternating with Mayakovsky’s play Mayakovsky, a Tragedy. Since then Victory has haunted Vitebsk, Berlin, Los Angeles, and London. It narrates the capture and burial of the sun, liberating planet earth to fly through time and space as a mother ship. A shimmering traveller arrives from far dimensions to explain in words beyond sense. ‘All is well that begins well and has no end!’ announced at its launch. The opera itself is now a traveller through time and space. It has survived wars and revolutions to deliver its message, urging us to use the energies of outer space to make for humanity a timeless, weightless, and infinite home. That vision of cosmic migration we begin at last to understand, now that we have ‘broken through the blue ring of the horizon.’ – John Milner

 

A Road not Taken (2010), Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller

Film screening, 66 mins

Thursday 26 May, 7pm

In 1979 former American President Jimmy Carter inaugurated a solar installation on the roof of the White House. This symbol of his pioneering energy policy was removed 7 years later by the Ronald Regan administration. Zurich based artists Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller found the White House solar panels on the canteen roof of an environmentally minded college in Maine. With two of the panels strapped to the back of a vegetable oil powered truck they set off on a road-trip. They deliver one of the panels to The National Museum of American History, Washington and the other to The Jimmy Carter Library & Museum, Atlanta, turning them into the “museum pieces” Carter had warned they might become.

Through archive footage and interviews with the former president and others, Hemauer and Keller investigate Carter’s energy policy in the context of the time: the 1979 energy shortages, the Iranian Revolution and the Three Mile Island Accident. The film revisits this early and ultimately futile attempt to reduce dependence on oil to ask questions about the current energy situation.

Admission free, no booking required.

Spaghetti Junctions

Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller

Saturday 16 April to Sunday 29 May 2011

Spaghetti Junctions by Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller explores two short-lived experiments with solar energy, both marking points of crisis or change in the history of fossil fuel consumption. Through video, archive material, text and sculptural-recreation the exhibition looks back to the first industrial-scale solar plant built in Egypt in 1913 – the same year that Victory over the Sun was first performed – and the symbolic solar installation Jimmy Carter inaugurated on the White House roof in 1979.

Spaghetti Junctions is generously supported by the Arts Council England,

Outset Contemporary Art Fund, The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Solar UK, Matt’s Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and the Zabludowicz Collection.