Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff Surprise: Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin have been reincarnated as an Iranian and an African-American and they roam today’s New York. At times they are a comic duo, at others the voice of our conscience: the babbling couple provides good weapons to attack the world.

In 1948 the James Agee wrote a scenario for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. Deeply disturbed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Agee imagined New York destroyed. In the ruins, Chaplin's Little Tramp builds a shack in Central Park. Gradually a small community of the dispossessed grows up around him. For Agee, his story was a thought experiment about how one might start again in the aftermath of disaster, to go beyond capitalism and just how hard that is in the face of our modern technological world. The film focuses on his imaginative journey and what it might mean for us today.

Inspired by J.G. Ballard's novel Crash, the film focuses on Jack and Diana Weston, who, after suffering a car crash, find their lives intruded upon by Dr. de Freis, a chronicler of car accidents who attempts to verify the psychological changes that occur in victims of accidents and the subsequent articulation of their anxieties.

Alice ends up in the derelict houses of Coney Island and Times Square. She sinks into a wonderland of decadence and despair, into the no-mans-land of lost souls, charlatans, broken dreams and cheap perversions.

(Fictional history) A film by Eddie Kammerer (1972), 16mm sound

(Fictional history): Year: 1931 Filmmaker: Charmian de Forde Music: Duke Ellington, "Mooche", "Black and Tan" Transfer note: copied at 24 frames per second from a 16mm black and white Kodak print with variable density optical sound track. Running time: 6 minutes 22 seconds

Beyond is a mysterious virtual world. In a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry, it explores the paradoxes of technology, desire and the paranormal posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction. One might call it an investigation of the "dream life" of technology, from around 1850 to 1940.

Zoe Beloff introduces the other installation, Days of the Commune, in her exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Beloff studied the activities at Occupy Wall Street and created documentary style drawings of what she saw. She then recruited actors, activists and artists to take part in performances of Bert Brecht's play, 'Days of the Commune', written about the Paris Commune of 1871.