This volume stems from a collaboration between the artist Runa Islam and the designer Manuel Raeder against the backdrop of the exhibition Runa Islam held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011. This collaboration attempts to give another form to the works after the event of the exhibition has passed. The artist provided Raeder with stills from the four films on show: “Emergence” (2011), “This Much Is Uncertain” (2009–2010), “Magical Consciousness” (2010) and “The House Belongs to Those Who Inhabit It” (2008).
According to the exhibition's curator, Christian Rattemeyer, these four films can be interpreted “as a transition from a concern for the linguistic nature of film to one primarily focused on issues of reflection and projection”. Raeder gave back to Islam a “sculpture in print” that does not just document the exhibition and offer a view of the three newer works on display, but draws upon the concepts underpinning the exhibition and the work of the filmmaker. (Excerpt from the introduction by Milovan Farronato)
Published following the exhibition “Projects 95: Runa Islam” at MoMa, New York, 27 May–19 September 2011.
British artist Runa Islam (born 1970 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, lives and works in London) primarily uses the medium of film in austere and minimal installations that combine a rigorous logic of conception with a highly poetic style. They often take the conventions, histories, materiality, and grammar of film—its language of framing, panning, zooming, editing, and projection—as the bases for structural investigation and narrative experiment. Astutely aware that perception of the world is mediated by cinematic and technological representation, Islam positions her images on the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, legibility and silence, stability and instability, syntactical simplicity and symbolic complexity.
