Now Open: Greater Toronto Art 2024, March 22–July 28.

David Hartt

The Republic

November 10, 2020
–November 20, 2020

David Hartt, The Republic, 2014. HD video, 16′08″.

In the early 1960s, Constantinos Doxiadis was commissioned by the Greek military Junta to develop the master plan for Athens and to bring some order to the explosive post-war growth and urbanization the city was experiencing. In 1965, he was commissioned by Detroit Edison to lead the “Developing Urban Detroit Area Research Project.” The fall of the junta in 1974 and the Detroit riots of 1967 changed the historical trajectory of both cities and neither commission was realized. Hartt’s ongoing inquiry into the ideological implications of the built environment engages a variety of media. Shot in both Athens and Detroit, the footage, set to a score by Sam Prekop, is montaged so that the locations become indiscernible and a hybrid city-state emerges. Interspersed at random moments throughout the film is a group of labourers who flip an automobile in a winter landscape as both an invocation of the myth of Sisyphus and a reenactment of civil disorder.

This video has been selected as part of a programmatic take over by independent curator, Daisy Desrosiers.

Past Shift Key Programmes

A still from Cecilia Vicuña "Paracas" (1983)
Cecilia Vicuña
Paracas
A Still from Cauleen Smith "Pilgrim" (2017)
Cauleen Smith
Pilgrim
Mona Hatoum
Roadworks
Aura Satz
Preemptive Listening (Part 1: The Fork in the Road)