Zoe Beloff

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Zoe Beloff
Zbeloff.jpg
Zoe Beloff
Born
Occupation Installation, art, and Film

Zoe Beloff (born 1958) is an artist residing in New York who works primarily in installation, film, and drawing.

Contents

Biography

Zoe Beloff was raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. [1] In 1980 she moved to New York, and a few years later she received an MFA in Film from Columbia University. [2] An early work, from 1986, was an apparently unauthorized film adaptation of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash , a short entitled Nightmare Angel that she filmed in collaboration with Susan Emerling. [3]

Beloff's work is heavily involved with history, and she is sometimes considered to be working in the field of media archaeology. [4] She often creates works that intervene in the past, binding together new and old technologies, concepts, and materials in narratives that conflate fiction and fact. [4] She is especially interested in the history of psychoanalysis and the paranormal. In the 1990s, she created the web serial Beyond to play with potential intersections between mind, technology, the paranormal, electromagnetism, language, and desire. One of her most expansive projects is a series of works created around her imaginary early 20th century Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its "founder," Albert Grass, exhibited at Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc. in London in 2010. [5]

Beloff's collaborators have included John Cale (in a 1989 film Wonderland USA), the Wooster Group—especially actor Kate Valk—and cultural critic Norman M. Klein. [1] In 1996, the Wooster Group commissioned her to develop a satellite CD-ROM project inspired by their theatrical work House/Lights (which was itself derived from Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights ). Beloff created Where Where ThereThere Where as a group of moving panoramas representing the technological development of the computer in the 19th and 20th centuries. Treating Stein's texts not as a story but as "a set of logical operations," Beloff used the texts as a kind of code controlling the movement of the panoramas. [6]

In 2012, in response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Beloff directed a version of Bertolt Brecht's 1949 play The Days of the Commune . Working with cinematographer Eric Muzzy, Beloff set the play in multiple locations around New York City, performing one scene a day in such popular gathering places as Zuccotti Park, an East Village community garden, and the steps of the New York Public Library. [2]

Beloff has published several books. DREAMLAND: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Their Circle (2009) details the society's history from Sigmund Freud's (real) 1909 visit to Coney Island up through the 1970s. Albert Grass: The Adventures of a Dreamer (2010) is a comic book prototype by the society's founder, Albert Grass. The Somnambulists: A Compendium of Sources (2008) is an anthology of essays and material that inspired a video installation examining the late 19th century psychoanalytical fixation on the idea of hysteria.

Beloff's work has been recognized internationally, with exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Pompidou Center (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), Site Santa Fe, and now Chicago. [1] [4] She was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2009 Athens Biennale. [1] [4] She received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (1997) [7] and has been honored by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003). She is a professor in the Departments of Media Studies and Art at Queens College, New York. [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zoe_Beloff.jpg

Works

Zoe Beloff 2011 Zoe Beloff.jpg
Zoe Beloff 2011

Films and 3D performances

Installations

Interactive media

Books

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Zoe's Biography". Zoe Beloff website.
  2. 1 2 3 Hirsh, Jennie. "Days of the Commune: An Interview with Zoe Beloff". Art in America, May 3, 2013.
  3. Taylor, Brett (October–November 2009). "The Forgotten Crash: Nightmare Angel". Video Watchdog (152): 12–16.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Parikka, Jussi. "'With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be': An Interview with Zoe Beloff". Electronic Book Review, Oct. 24, 2011.
  5. "VIKTOR WYND FINE ART INC". www.viktorwyndfineart.co.uk. Retrieved 4 October 2015.
  6. Jamieson, Helen. "From Paper and Ink to Pixels and Links". (2000).
  7. "Zoe Beloff :: Foundation for Contemporary Arts". www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org. Retrieved 5 April 2018.
  8. "The Tramp's New World".
  9. "EFF: The Tramps New World: Q&A". 8 April 2022.
  10. "Home". daysofthecommune.com.
  11. Beloff, Zoe. "Films and 3D Performances". Zoe Beloff's website. Retrieved 11 March 2017. "Exile IFFR" . Retrieved 12 June 2019.
  12. Beloff, Zoe. "Installations". Zoe Beloff website. Retrieved 11 March 2017. "Emotions Go to Work - Museum Dr Guislain" . Retrieved 12 June 2019.
  13. Beloff, Zoe. "Interactive Works". Zoe Beloff website. Retrieved 11 March 2017.
  14. Parade of the old new: Panorama ; the troublemakers: History painting in the real world. Zoe Beloff. 2021. ISBN   9781639443109.
  15. Reminiscences of a refugee childhood. Transits; vol. 2. 2021. ISBN   9781639441419.
  16. Beloff, Zoe (1 January 2018). Between Worlds: An Asylum Seeker in America. OCLC   1057120892.
  17. Beloff, Zoe; Leslie, Esther; Frank, Hannah (1 January 2016). A world redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood. ISBN   9780977869688. OCLC   960724964.
  18. Grass, Albert; Beloff, Zoe (1 January 2016). The adventures of a dreamer: picture stories in colors, vol 1. ISBN   9780977869640. OCLC   956338952.
  19. Beloff, Zoe; Beebe, Aaron; Klein, Norman; Herzog, Amy; Grass, Albert; de Forde, Charmion; Rosenzweig, Arthur; Lippman, Milly; Weisengrund, Teddy (1 January 2009). The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its circle. New York: Christine Burgin. ISBN   978-0977869602. OCLC   481599253.
  20. Beloff, Zoe; Bellwether Gallery; Arcite Gallery (1 January 2008). The somnambulists: a compendium of source material. New York: Christine Burgin. ISBN   9780615219158. OCLC   973425725.

Further reading