Dara Friedman

Dancer
January 28 - May 14, 2012

Image: Dara Friedman
 Dancer, 2011 (film still).
 Super 16mm film transferred to HD video, black & white, sound.
 Running time: 25 minutes.
 Courtesy of the artist, Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, and Miami Art Museum, Miami

Visitors with children may wish to preview this film before entering. Film contains brief nudity. Running time: 25 minutes.

Raleigh, December 2011—CAM Raleigh’s newest presentation, Dancer created by Dara Friedman opens January 28, 2012. Miami-based artist Dara Friedman, born in 1968 in Germany, documents a series of dances that took place on the gritty and lush landscape of Miami, Florida in the spring of 2011. Unfolding principally in seemingly effortless tracking shots and enmeshed in a moving soundtrack, the film captures 66 performers in 40 segments as they dance, during the day and at night, along Miami’s sidewalks, in its parks and parking garages, street corners, bus benches, and on its beaches. Pole, funk, Flamenco, ballet, modern, break, belly, and ballroom dancing are all energetically represented, as are skateboarding, skipping, and voguing. The film focuses upon the isolation of city life and at the same time upon the vitality of city life. The film depicts a crowded Miami street corner, where an unexpected and memorable performance could be a seen as a daily occurrence.

Executive Director of CAM Raleigh, Elysia Borowy-Reeder, says "If in the last century the crisis of representation was resolved by new ways of seeing, then in the twenty-first century the challenge is for artists to suggest new ways of experiencing. Friedman’s Dancer is contemporary art about contemporary existence."

Dancer is the most recent film in an unofficial trilogy of new works by Friedman that focus on performance and public space. In 2007, the Public Art Fund commissioned Musical, 2007-2008, which captured spontaneous actions orchestrated across Manhattan. In 2009, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt commissioned Friedman to create a performance as part of the exhibition Playing The City. Frankfurt Song, 2010, asked the city's array of street musicians to interpret the Rolling Stones’ 1969 song You Can't Always Get What You Want. The performance and subsequent film takes a snapshot of the city and makes a point of highlighting the endless renaissance of its people, places, and politics.

Dancer, 2011, is co-produced by the Miami Art Museum and was most recently presented at the New World Symphony’s “New World Center Screen” as part of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Opening Preview Celebrations
Founders and Leadership Circle Preview Reception
Friday, January 27, 2012
5:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.
Join CAM Raleigh's Leadership Circle to attend this special exhibition preview.

Member Preview Reception
Friday, January 27, 2012
7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.
Become a CAM Raleigh member to attend this special exhibition preview.