Promises: Through Congress

After a young Swedish perfumer is stung by a jellyfish in the South of France, an attractive older man comes to her aid.

Roberta Flack’s place in music history was assured when she became the first artist to win back-to-back Grammy Awards for Record of the Year with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (1973) and “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (1974). The depth and complexity of her lyrical and thematic choices, as well as the sophisticated mix of classical and soul influences on her style, all sprang from a woman who thoughtfully interrogated her role and identity throughout her life. Filmmaker Antonino D’Ambrosio has created a marvelous monument to a singular and unclassifiable musical genius, with commentary from contemporary artists whom she has inspired.

In 1972, officer Frank Serpico exposes the corruption which poisons the roots of the NYPD and becomes famous in 1973 when director Sidney Lumet tells his story in the classic film “Serpico,” starring Al Pacino.

A dynamic configuration of images and videos overlaid with musings on human existence.

After an unspoken line is crossed, three women are forced to navigate strange passageways and painful secrets.

Commissioned for the Irish representation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, The Enclave is an immersive, six-screen video art installation by Irish contemporary artist Richard Mosse. Partly inspired by Joseph Conrad’s modernist literary masterpiece Heart of Darkness, the visceral and moving work was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo using 16mm colour infra-red film, which captures otherwise invisible parts of the spectrum. The resulting imagery in Mosse’s work is hallucinatory and dream-like with the usual greens of jungle and forest replaced by shimmering violet. The Enclave depicts a complicated, strife-ridden place in a way that reflects its complexity, using a strategy of beauty and transfixion to combat the wider invisibility of a conflict that has claimed so many.

In the centre of the gallery is a pavilion housing the 35mm film Paradise (2021), the final work of the trilogy. It is the first time that Paradise is being shown as an artwork outside of its staging in the ballet. The soundtrack is a digital simulation of Thomas Adès’s orchestrated score Paradiso. Known technically as a MIDI, the computer simulation became an invaluable tool while the orchestra were unable to record the music during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Paradise was filmed in the extended format Cinemascope and is entirely abstract, drawing on the circular and planetary motifs present in Dante’s ‘Paradiso’. The film’s rich colours were taken from the palette of William Blake (b. 1757 – d. 1827, London) and can also be seen in the ten hand-printed silkscreen prints representing the planetary states in the corridor.

50 ½ minute 16 mm continuous film loop of artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu in conversation. The idea for a film featuring Hurtado and Mehretu grew out of Dean’s incredible chance discovery, in 2019, that these two artists, both longtime friends of hers, shared the same birthday of November 28—and, moreover, that in 2020, Julie would be turning 50, and Luchita 100. Filmed over the course of a single day, January 3, 2020, in Hurtado’s Santa Monica apartment, the artists’ conversation meanders through subjects ranging from motherhood, to the environment, to their experiences immigrating to the U.S. as children, and, most movingly, to painting as a way of understanding one’s place in the world. description adapted from Jennifer King, associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA

Petals cannot digitize themselves. Human hands must individually open the flower, pick the petal, place it under the lens, press the shutter, and upload the image to the cloud. Then again, and again, and again. Computers document the signals generated by humans. When computers were human, they were often women. In August, 10,000 roses were placed in the atrium of Bell Works. The work of photographing the individual petals and turning them into a dataset was performed by sixteen men. The photographs, a sequence of petals, reenact the rose. Beauty compels the act of replication.

21-year-old Halit Yozgat was assassinated in broad daylight, in his family’s internet cafe on April 6, 2006 in Kassel Germany. Five witnesses were present in the 77 square metre space when Halit was shot twice in the head. Remarkably, an undercover agent from the German secret service was among those present in the cafe at the time of the murder, yet he claimed not to have heard gunfire nor noticed the body slumped at the front desk. A rigorous counter-investigation by London-based research agency Forensic Architecture inspired the Australian composer and director Ben Frost to write the opera The Murder of Halit Yozgat. With his unconventional combination of sound art, electronic music and dark metal, Frost brings a performance in which a sound nobody heard irrevocably ties all of those present together.

Sidney Felsen, who passed away in 2024 at age 99, was a true Los Angeles institution. He co-founded Gemini G.E.L. alongside Stanley Grinstein in 1966 and spent decades overseeing, photographing, and befriending some of the greatest postwar American artists of his generation. Sidney kept a quiet, joyful ritual: decorating the envelopes that carried artists’ royalty checks, using his beloved collection of postage and rubber stamps that filled his iconic office — a room filled with photographs of every artist he had ever worked with. It was Julie Mehretu who first introduced Tacita to Gemini. Knowing Sidney’s deep affection for Julie, Dean asked him to decorate an envelope for her. The result is this poignant 14-minute film: Sidney, impeccably dressed as always, at his desk, doing what he loved most.