The Cinema Effect. Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image. Realism. CaixaForum Madrid

The cinema is everywhere nowadays: on television, on computers, on mobile phones, etc. And the cinematic language has become crucial to understanding contemporary art and culture. ”la Caixa” Social Outreach Programmes presents a new exhibition exploring the cinema's influence on the construction of our visual culture. The Cinema Effect. Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image is divided into two parts, Realism and Dreams. This distinction is made in order to focus on the two dimensions that the cinema has occupied since its birth: "dreams", as exemplified in the films of Georges Méliès; and "realisms", as seen in the Lumière brothers' documentaries.

To reflect on these two branches in the cinematic arts, the exhibition features a selection of works by contemporary artists who work with documentary images and multimedia installations to speak to the spectator about universal ideas: the image of the present, the construction of memory, subjectivity, simulation... Realism, the part presented at CaixaForum Madrid, considers the ways in which the visual support can alter not only how we see reality but also what reality actually is. The artists represented in the show explore how the moving image can be used to entertain, to deceive and to complicate the way in which we navigate reality. The Cinema Effect. Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image. Realism features works by Paul Chan, Ian Charlesworth, Omer Fast, Runa Islam, Isaac Julien, Julian Rosefeldt, Mungo Thomson and Kerry Tribe.

The curators of the exhibition The Cinema Effect. Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image. Realism, an exhibition jointly organised by ”la Caixa” Social Outreach Programmes and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, are Kerry Brougher, Anne Ellegood, Kelly Gordon and Kristen Hileman. The show will be open to the public at CaixaForum Madrid from 28 January to 24 April 2011. The second part of the exhibition, Dream, will open at CaixaForum Barcelona in May.