Exhibition: Babette Mangolte. I = Eye

Babette Mangolte (US citizen, born in France 1941) is an iconic figure of the international experimental film. I = EYE serves as a landmark celebration of her seminal artistic œuvre and is one of her most comprehensive solo exhibitions to date.

Mangolte’s early interests lay within the field of performance: documenting the art, dance and theater scene of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s she began to focus on the urban environment and the vast landscapes of the U.S. West Coast. I = Eye presents a diverse array of Mangolte’s films and photographic works (including recent projects revisiting the transcription of performance and its historicisation.) They connect in an absolutely unique form influences from silent cinema, American experimental films, and feminist film theory to generate her very special handwriting.

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, influenced by Mangolte’s crucial interest in the staging of the subjective camera, is conceived with an accordingly experimental approach as a score using time and space as a medium.

Babette Mangolte was the cinematographer for Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer a.o. In 1975 Mangolte completed What Maisie Knew, her first film, which received the "Prix de la Lumiere" at the Toulon Film Festival in 1975. Other important films by Babette Mangolte are amongst others: The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977), The Cold Eye (1980), The Sky on Location (1982), Visible Cities (1991) and Four Pieces by Morris (1993). One of her most recent films is Seven Easy Pieces (2007) which documents Marina Abramović’s re-enactment of seminal works from the 1970s at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.