Sarah Morris creates paintings and films in which she traces urban and social topologies. She explores both the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics in order to survey how a particular moment can be inscribed and embedded into its visual surfaces. Morris assesses what today’s architectural façades and urban structures, cities and nations, might conceal. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in conspiratorial studies of power, the structures of control, and global socio-political networks. Her most recent film, Beijing (2008), focuses on one of the most intricate and ambiguous internationally broadcasted events of the past years – the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
Beijing is a feature-length film that portrays not only the Games’ locations and protagonists, but also those of other kinds of ‘contests’ raging in China today, for instance, in industry and architecture. The extreme manifestation of power and the astronomical amounts of money absorbed – and produced – by such an event go beyond branding as a mere marketing tool, establishing instead a kind of ‘nation-branding’, a political apparatus to re-position entire countries and cultures. Her film is a surreal portrait of an authoritarian state of turbo-capitalism during a period when the International Olympic Committee effectively took over sovereignty of the capital city. It depicts a hitherto closed country at a moment of apparent and possibly theatrical openness, a hidden culture at a moment of extreme visibility. Consequently the film questions the authorship of the spectacle, who is in control, and ultimately, the role of the artist.
—Colophon
Texts
Colin Chinnery, Anthony Lane, Andrea Phillips, with a foreword by the editors.
Editors
Nicolaus Schafhausen, Zoë Gray, Gianfranco Maraniello, Andrea Viliani, Susanne Gaensheimer, Sophie von Olfers
Format
Hardback book, sawn binding; 225 x 305 mm; 288 pages; 120 full page color- and 8 b/w photographs
Design
Richard Massey
Cinematography
David Daniel
Still photography
Sean Dack
Project management
Zoë Gray
Production
Sophie von Olfers
Copyediting
Julia Dault, Zoë Gray, Helga Ostermeier, Mirelle Phillips
Number of copies
2000
Language
English
Reproduction work and printing
Printmanagement Plitt, Oberhausen
Publication date
May 20 2009
Printed in Germany
ISBN
978-86560-646-4
Publisher
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König
Exhibition partners
Witte de With, MAMbo—Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main