"Motion into Being" Reframed

The group exhibition “Motion into Being” Reframed looks at regimes of representation—as a set of conventions and rules—in relation to the notion of being human as a constantly shifting interplay of bodies and technologies, visual forms and linguistic structures. Instead of a specific concept or theory, “Motion into Being” Reframed takes an artwork as its starting point: Anna Craycroft’s installation Motion into Being (2018), realized as an artist-in-residence project at the New Museum, New York.

With nine short films at its center, Anna Craycroft’s work brings together the history of animation film with questions around the shifting definitions of a subject being recognized as human within legal language. As the artistic practices of Ericka Beckman, Sara Enrico, Elisabeth Kihlström, Laure Prouvost, and Sofie Thorsen relate to notions of play as well as the heterogenous cultures of modernity, the exhibition deliberately departs from the specificity of the legal language that Anna Craycroft’s installation focuses on, in order to create an open dialogue between Motion into Being and other works in the show. Artists in the exhibition address the relationship between abstraction and the human figure (Sara Enrico), or explore the connection between the narrative structure of cinema and the affective force of language (Laure Prouvost).