This week is the last chance to check out i know you are, but what am i? before it comes down Saturday, Feb 4.
Jun 5, 2012 – Jul 28, 2012
JUN 5 – JUL 28, 2012
For nearly two millennia, artists who have wished to depict Jesus Christ have had to make difficult decisions about the appearance of the person to play the role. InCasting Jesus (2011), Christian Jankowski allows the viewer to become a fly on the wall, observing as a distinguished panel of representatives from the Vatican—including Monseñor José Manuel del Rio Carrasco, Vatican Priest; Sandro Barbagallo, Art Critic at the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano newspaper; and Massimo Giraldi, journalist and Secretary of the Commission for Film Classification of the Italian Bishop Conference—engage in the process of casting actors in the role of Jesus Christ.
Filmed by Jankowski in the Complesso Monumentale Santo Spirito in Saxia, Rome, and watched via live video stream by a separate audience of 300, the jury gradually narrows the field down to one as they observe the actors completing a variety of tasks including breaking bread, performing a miracle and reciting scripture, as well as dramatic recitations of aphorisms attributed to Jesus.
By contrasting the acknowledged earnestness and religious faith of the jurors with a selection process that borrows heavily from pop culture mainstays such as American Idol, Casting Jesus also thoughtfully explores the difficulties and absurdities in human efforts to encompass the divine. At the same time, however, the dialogue between the Vatican jurors and the actors lays bare the hidden processes of thousands of years of art history that have resulted in varied depictions of Jesus Christ as Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement and actor Jim Cavaziel’s portrayal in The Passion of the Christ (2004).
SPECIAL EVENTS:
Christian Jankowski (born 1968 in Göttingen, Germany) is a contemporary multimedia artist who largely works with video, installation and photography. His practice analyzes realms of criteria and rhetoric within art institutions, news media, popular culture and spectatorship. Through humor and wit he makes his viewer and the subject productively question their relationships to one another through plays on iconography, value and information.