Working with narrative film and video installation, Julian Rosefeldt's American Night (2009) is one of his most lavish productions to date.
In American Night, Rosefeldt seductively summons, and then breaks the main tropes of the Hollywood Western - the communal campfire, the saloon, the log cabin where a woman silently waits - to undermine the foundation myth of the USA.
Rosefeldt places the spectator not in front of the work, but rather in an ambiguous, unstable position somewhere between inside and outside. By slowly revealing the film sets, and by exposing the on-screen dialogue as quotations from films, songs and contemporary politicians' speeches, American Night presents a troubled site of popular memory.
When
21 Jun – 31 Jul 2011