Reach Capacity

Since the 1970s Ericka Beckman has been known for her idiosyncratic visual language integrating gaming structures as well as aspects of experimental cinema and popular culture in her moving image works. Based on her research on the strategy game Monopoly and its unexpected socialist origins, Beckman’s most recent film Reach Capacity (2020) addresses the current property crisis and gentrification in the US. It is paired with the artist’s earlier work Switch Center (2003), shot in a 1960s water purification plant outside Budapest, and followed by documentation of her first performance piece Stalk (2021), Beckman’s take on the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk and conceived as a “potential ending” of Reach Capacity, which premiered at Performa in New York last year. The program will be introduced by with another re-interpretation of a well-known story, Cinderella (1986).

Program

Ericka Beckman,
Cinderella, 1986, 28 min
Switch Center, 2003, 12 min
Reach Capacity, 2020, 15 min
Stalk, 2021, 30 min

Presented by Bettina Brunner, followed by a conversation with Ericka Beckman

Ericka Beckman is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. Graduating from Cal Arts, she started to exhibit in the mid-1970s in independent spaces in New York. Since then she has shown her work internationally in exhibitions and film programs, most recently in solo exhibitions at M Leuven, Belgium (2020) and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2021).

Bettina Brunner is an art historian, curator, and art critic based in Vienna. She works at the intersection of curatorial practice and academic research in the fields of avantgarde film and contemporary art. Her most recent exhibition project “Motion into Being” Reframed (2021) at the exhibition space of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna included an early film work by Ericka Beckman.