This Friday (and after Valentine’s Day), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will be opening two new MATRIX exhibitions.
The first comes from Anna Halprin, and her performance piece Parades and Changes. Presented by MATRIX 246, this was a pioneering use of everyday movements and domestic rituals in dance, along with the onset of postmodern choreography. Randomly done by choice, it revolves around a series of mundane tasks including unrolling giant sheets of plastic, and interacting with the audience. This performance piece was first performed back in the mid-1960’s, opening the current location that sits near College and Telegraph Avenues. BAMPFA is presenting the final stages, as a celebration of the museum’s architecture and history, while preparing for the move to a new downtown location in 2015.
The next MATRIX exhibition comes from Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose video installation Morakot (Emerald) goes inside the rooms of a defunct Bangkok hotel, called the Morakot Hotel. The place was a considered a safe haven for Cambodian refugees, who was fleeing the Vietnamese invasion of the 1980s. The hotel closed in the late 1990s, following a collapse in the Thai economy, and has remained abandoned to this day. Weerasethakul’s video’s breathes life back into this hotel, as it tells the story of not only it being considered a fantastical dreamscape for guests that stayed there, but also its overall interior and exterior history, which includes a scene of a hanging green light casting a “ethereal glow” over the gallery.
Both MATRIX exhibitions will be on view until April 21st. Log on to bampfa.berkeley.edu for more information.
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