 – Opening this Friday, February 14, 2025 in the Anna K. Meredith Gallery of the Des Moines Museum of Art, “Time Travelers” is an exhibition of…){kind=link}
Single-channel video, 4k, Super 16mm transferred to digital, color, 5.1 surround sound
Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Pamela Bass-Bookey and Harry Bookey Moving-Image and Time-Based Art Fund and the Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc., 2023.32
Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
DES MOINES, IA (PNAN) – Opening this Friday, February 14, 2025 in the Anna K. Meredith Gallery of the Des Moines Museum of Art, “Time Travelers” is an exhibition of large-scale installations from the Center’s permanent collections: Mika Rottenberg’s “Cheese” and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “The Boat People.”
Beyond exploring folklore, history and cultural products of bygone eras, these artists create work that explores these two philosophical views and the various points in between. In this exhibit, they reimagine elements of the past by employing craft techniques, borrowing antique objects and materials, and reclaiming ancient narratives.
Rottenberg’s “Cheese” takes inspiration from the real-life Sutherland sisters, who built a successful career on the basis of their long hair. Using surrealism and off-kilter humor, this artist transforms the sisters into fairy tale maidens, creating literal food from their famous hair. While highlighting individuals whose unusual lives are mostly forgotten, Rottenberg’s vision highlights the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies, a topic that remains relevant today.
Nguyen’s “The Boat People” places its characters in the future rather than the past. It is a cinematic, episodic film in which a group of children collect relics from a post-apocalyptic world, trying to decipher events from an almost-lost history. The children’s existential and ritualistic approach to the objects they find is poetic and poignant.