Tickets include access to the Minimal exhibition.
In resonance with the exhibition Minimal, films by artists featured in the exhibition – Charlotte Posenenske, Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, and Agnes Martin – will be screened at the Auditorium during the Friday late-night openings.
In the 1970s, American artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014) created a series of experimental videos exploring perception, memory, and the relationship to landscape. The films in this program reflect her time spent in the Utah desert — where she traveled with artist Robert Smithson and installed her iconic land art work Sun Tunnels (1976) — as well as her experiments with framing and point of view, in dialogue with her work Locators with Loci (1971), presented at the Bourse de Commerce.
Program
- Utah Sequences, 1970.
Nancy Holt. 8 mm color film, silent, 9 min 22.
In this film, long believed lost, Nancy Holt explores the natural and industrial environments of Rozel Point, Utah, on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake — the same state where, six years later, she would create her landmark land art sculpture Sun Tunnels (1976). The film shows a wooden cabin, an amphibious vehicle, and remnants of oil extraction facilities, now almost entirely vanished. By contrast, the tar seeps and salt-covered pelicans so present in the film remain characteristic features of the site today.
The film opens a reflection on entropy, temporality, and the traces of human intervention, while also shedding light on Holt’s time in Utah with Robert Smithson, revealing the construction of his major work Spiral Jetty (1970) — a vast black basalt spiral extending into the Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point.
- Going Around in Circles, 1973.
Nancy Holt. Black-and-white video, sound, 15 min.
Filmed with curator and art critic Bruce Kurtz and his students on the campus of Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, Going Around in Circles reflects Holt’s sustained interest in how we perceive our surroundings.
The film takes inspiration from her early sculptures, the Locators — T-shaped welded steel pipes whose structure channels the viewer’s gaze. Following the same principle, Holt placed a panel pierced with five holes in front of the camera, alternately covering and uncovering them. Through these openings, five participants move while following the instruction to “turn in circles.” Holt, Kurtz, and the students then view the recording together and discuss their experience — this conversation forms the video’s soundtrack.
- Zeroing In, 1973.
Nancy Holt. Black-and-white video, sound, 31 min 15.
In Zeroing In, Nancy Holt and novelist and experimental critic Ted Castle observe a New York intersection from a building window, using two devices: a cylindrical tube and a black panel pierced with five holes that can be opened or closed.
Repeatedly, Holt asks, “What do you see?” As objects are alternately hidden and identified, disoriented and relocated, a dialogue unfolds on vision, identity, and experience.
- Sun Tunnels, 1978.
Nancy Holt. 16 mm color film, sound, 26 min 31.
In this film, Nancy Holt documents the making of her land art masterpiece Sun Tunnels, composed of four massive concrete cylinders standing on the horizon — visible from over a mile away — in a remote valley of Utah’s Great Basin Desert.
Arranged in a cross, the structures are precisely aligned to frame the rising and setting sun during the summer and winter solstices. Small holes drilled into the concrete project the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn inside the tunnels, their patterns materializing in sunlight and illuminating the space around the viewer.
