Berlin Biennale | Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin

Lizzie Fitch * 1981 in Bloomington, US, lives and works in Los Angeles, US
Ryan Trecartin * 1981 in Webster, US, lives and works in Los Angeles, US

Expanding on a body of work begun in 2013, Fitch and Trecartin present sculptural theaters built around two new movies, Mark Trade and Permission Streak. The single, circular narrative of Mark Trade—which unfolds around a central character delivering aphoristic monologues to a camera crew traversing the American countryside—is here broadcast within a stylized concept bar, while the episodic composition of Permission Streak, a sequence of animations and character-driven vignettes, is presented within a space evocative of acrobatic and aquatic training. Combining footage from the late nineties to the present and shot variously in constructed sets, backyards, roadsides, mountains, salt flats, deserts, rural Ohio, and a lakeside cabin in the American Midwest, both movies treat cameras as active inflection points, catalyzing the characters’ mutable relationships to time, memory, and modes of anticipation.

List of works

(As yet untitled sculptural theater), 2016, exhibiting Ryan Trecartin, Mark Trade, 2016

Courtesy Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin; Sprüth Magers; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Commissioned and coproduced by Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
With the support of Sprüth Magers; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Installation view of (As yet untitled sculptural theater), 2016, exhibiting Ryan Trecartin, Mark Trade, 2016; courtesy Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin; Sprüth Magers; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; photo: Timo Ohler

Installation view of (As yet untitled sculptural theater), 2016, exhibiting Ryan Trecartin, Permission Streak, 2016; courtesy Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin; Sprüth Magers; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; photo: Timo Ohler