Michael Turner

A Portrait of Dodie and Kevin
1999
Video, color, no sound
3 min

November 8, 2024 – extended through Februar 16, 2025

(Schaufenster am Hofgarten & online)

Michael Turner’s A Portrait of Dodie and Kevin is a pensive, personal glimpse into the relationship of two avant-garde figures who have moved the world—for each other and for others. Anchored in the New Narrative movement that formed in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, the literary work of Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian set out to challenge linear, coherent narratives in favor of transgressive, queer-oriented prose and poetry. Their writings are at once conceptual and confessional, essayistic and fictional, laced with an obsession for (sexual) pleasure and the exploration of the self.

Turner’s three-minute silent video captures the soft faces of Bellamy and Killian, shot in a single take outside their San Francisco home in 1999. The only direction he gave them was to “stand still and stare down the camera.” In this way, the video, much like the writings of its two subjects, provides a kind of record of how and where daily life happens, relative to oneself and others.

Video still: Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, gift of Michael Turner, 2022.

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