Deborah-Joyce Holman: Close-Up
Jan 22 - Apr 13 2025
Swiss Institute is pleased to present Close-Up, the first institutional exhibition in the US by Deborah-Joyce Holman. Holman contends with the politics of representation of racialized and gendered subjects, interrogating the relationships between contemporary visual regimes and the material and ideological circulations of capital. Close-Up attends to and articulates sites of refusal with a single-channel film that features a contemplative Black actress in a modernist domestic setting, quietly engaged in mundane tasks.
Presented in SI’s lower-level gallery, Close-Up minutely restages a scene in a previous multichannel video work by the artist, Close-Up/Quiet As It’s Kept (2023). In each of these works, the viewer is presented with a despectacularized, non-narrative sequence that features the same actress in the same place. The camera trails behind as the figure enacts a series of quotidian movements – from drinking tea to lying on a couch – and pans across the home, focusing on its architectural details and various furnishings.
In contrast to the earlier work, Close-Up is shot on 16 mm film and trains the camera’s lens on the actress’s face and the interior space in close-up range throughout its duration. Framed from the clavicle to the crown, the magnified image of her expressionless countenance and the surrounding setting oscillates between portrait and anti-portrait. In dramatizing the dissonance between the actress’s intimate framing and her minor gestures, Close-Up formally challenges viewers’ presumed access to the interiority of marginalized subjects appearing on screen. The quality of the analog film also produces a textured celluloid veil that destabilizes the transparency of narrative by privileging haptic modes of encounter.
In Close-Up, Holman proposes a conceptual correspondence between the serial repetition of the film work and the ongoingly reproduced forms of structural and symbolic violence imposed on racialized and gendered subjects. If the aesthetic regimes of cinematic technology and the expropriated labors of these invisibilized subjects are bound up with one another, Close-Up looks beyond political grammars of repair to consider the quiet, disruptive frequencies of Black feminine agency within the filmic field of representation.
This exhibition is organized by Alison Coplan, Chief Curator, and KJ Abudu, Assistant Curator, Public Programs and Residencies.
In partnership with Kunstverein Freiburg
