Mai Hofstad Gunnes At ISCP Is The Daily Pic By Blake Gopnik

This is a still from a charming 16mm film called “Bike and Bolex”, by the young Norwegian artist Mai Hofstad Gunnes, which I saw (and caught on fuzzy video) in Erlend Hammer’s group exhibition at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn. (Click on the still to go to my video.) The little, looping movie shows five young women cycling through a park in Berlin, and filming each other as they do so. It evokes some 1970s experiments with moving cameras and bodies. But what does it mean to look back on that moment with nostalgia, rather than to have been in it, with full belief in its forward gaze? Has the radical become a period style, put on by a bevy of cute girls just the way they don their vintage dresses?

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