Alejandro Cesarco: Words Like Love: Alphaville, First Scenes

About

Words Like Love: Alphaville, First Scenes is installed on a 14-by-48-foot billboard over Jackson Avenue at the intersection of Queens Plaza in Long Island City. The work is a textual interpretation of the opening scene of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), an iconic science fiction/noir film that describes a futuristic dystopian society controlled by a supercomputer. Re-translating the film back into a screenplay, Cesarco's project stresses the descriptive and prescriptive function of scripts: the text in this case is made to both mirror its surroundings and, to some extent, dictate the reality we see before us. Through its prominent placement over a busy intersection in Queens, the billboard points to how texts mediate public space and social life while locating critical and resistant capacities in the acts of reading and interpretation.

Alejandro Cesarco (born Montevideo, Uruguay; lives and works in New York) addresses, through different formats and strategies, his recurrent interests in repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating. His most recent solo exhibitions include: Play, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin (2015); Prescribe The Symptom, Midway Contemporary Art, MN, (2015); Loyalties and Betrayals, Murray Guy, New York (2015); Secondary Revision, Frac île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris (2013); A Portrait, A Story, And An Ending, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2013); Alejandro Cesarco, MuMOK, Vienna (2012); Words Applied to Wounds, Murray Guy (2012); The Early Years, Tanya Leighton (2012); A Common Ground, Uruguayan Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennial (2011); One Without The Other, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico (2011); Present Memory, Tate Modern, London (2010). In 2011 Cesarco was included in the group exhibition Short Stories at SculptureCenter. He has also curated exhibitions in the U.S., Uruguay, Argentina and a project for the 6th Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2007). He is director of the non-profit arts organization Art Resources Transfer.

The project is curated by SculptureCenter Executive Director and Chief Curator, Mary Ceruti.