Outside Location /
1201 Minnesota Street
Extended through July 8! Due to popular demand, the Minnesota Street Project Foundation has added additional screening days to Broken Spectre's schedule, plus extended evening hours at the end of the show's run.
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Minnesota Street Project Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of 1201 Minnesota Street, the newest addition to the Project’s contemporary arts campus. In celebration of the new exhibition space, the Foundation, in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Altman Siegel, will co-present the U.S. premiere of Broken Spectre, Richard Mosse’s multi-channel large-screen video installation from the collection of SFMOMA.
Opening to the public on May 11 and running through June 30, 2023, Broken Spectre is the first in a series of programs the Foundation will co-present at 1201 Minnesota Street. “Unveiling the large-scale video screening gallery at 1201 Minnesota with a project co-presented by SFMOMA and Altman Siegel is emblematic of the collaborative work the Foundation is embarking on with the acquisition of our new space,” said Rachel Sample, Director, Minnesota Street Project Foundation.
“I am delighted to be able to co-present Broken Spectre alongside an exhibition of Mosse’s photographs at Altman Siegel,” said Claudia Altman-Siegel. “The two parts of the series shown together vividly illustrate Richard Mosse’s important research in the Amazon Basin. 1201 Minnesota provides the perfect venue to present exceptionally ambitious installations, and I can think of nothing more urgent to share with the public than this breathtaking film about humanity’s delicate balance with nature.”
“Following on the heels of SFMOMA’s presentation of Richard Mosse: Incoming in 2019, we continue to embrace works that engage our senses when addressing the urgent environmental crisis,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “Focusing on environmental sustainability and deepening SFMOMA’s relationships with organizations in our community are two major institutional priorities. We’re therefore thrilled to collaborate on the U.S. premiere of this important and engaging installation which recently entered our collection with generous support by the artist, the VIA Art Fund, and the Westridge Foundation.”
Broken Spectre (2022) is a dreamlike immersive video artwork that forms an extensive record of widespread yet unseen fronts of deforestation and industrialized ecocide in the Amazon, unveiled using a range of powerful scientific imaging technologies, at the tipping point of this crucial ecosystem’s erasure.
Through abrupt leaps in scale and medium, the film reveals unsustainable processes of extractive violence: illegal logging, mass burning, wildcat goldmining, the theft of Indigenous lands, species extinction, flooding and damming of rivers, and the forest’s colonization for encroaching monoculture plantations and vast intensive cattle farms.
“For decades, scientists have harnessed advanced forms of remote sensing photography to understand the forest’s degradation, model tipping points, and reveal impending environmental catastrophe underway in the Amazon. In Broken Spectre, I have tried to dial in on these opaque subjects using similar scientific imaging technologies, aggravated media that carry some agency in the biome’s destruction, as they are also used as tools of resource extraction by mining and agribusiness interests. So, as in past projects, the media I have chosen to tell these stories is embedded with complex, invisible layers of the systems involved, on international, governmental, and local levels. And I’ve used these media to make a Western, because the fraught iconography of the Western film carries uncanny echoes of the reality that I encountered in the field — a natural paradise and its Indigenous population being colonized by pioneer settlers with the righteous zeal of Manifest Destiny and a distinctly Texano style of cowboy culture. Broken Spectre, which I made in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost, is a disquieting portrait of willful environmental catastrophe along the Trans-Amazonian Highway told through a kaleidoscope of scientific, cultural, historic, socio-political, activist, and anthropological filters.” —Richard Mosse
Following Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre, the Minnesota Street Project Foundation will continue to focus on collaborative exhibitions and a media arts program for 2023 and 2024 in the video screening gallery, alongside preparations for the future growth and programming of the new 1201 Minnesota Street warehouse space.