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Runa Islam
Runa Islam makes film and video installations that use overlapping layers of narrative to explore notions of truth and fiction, subjectivity and authorship. Islam installs her films in architectural configurations, frequently presenting them across two or three screens as a framing device. Her work aims to blur the distinctions between film and sculpture, art and cinema, and encourages a range of interpretations from viewers.
Early works often emerged from her interest in well-known passages of avant-garde film. Tuin (1998), for example, recreates a moment from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Martha (1973) and in Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot (2003), the artist re-stages the film in the 1960s Brutalist car park featured in the cult film Get Carter (1971). In more recent work, Islam often takes a single visual motif as her point of departure, such as a woman distractedly spinning a ring in Dead Time (2000), a girl turning towards the camera and then vanishing in Turn (Gaze of Orpheus) (1998), a group of rickshaw drivers instructed by the artist to sit and do nothing in First Day of Spring (2005), or a cable car receding from its port in Time Lines (2005). From these initial images, she intertwines a range of visual and conceptual languages, combining analytical and experimental sequences to create beguilingly open-ended works. In her most recent work, Conditional Probability (2006), Islam has worked with an inner city school, recruiting the pupils to act in a series of interrelated mise-en-scènes.
Runa Islam was born in 1970 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She lives and works in London, UK. She has participated in many group exhibitions, including the Prospect 2, New Orleans (2010) the 6th Asia Pacific Triennale, Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2009), The Cinema Effect, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2008) the Turner Prize, Tate Britian (2008), Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007) the 51st International Venice Biennale (2005), More than This! Negotiating Realities, Göterborg International Biennale for Contemporary Art (2005) and 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003). Solo exhibitions include Runa Islam, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2010) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010) The Restless Subject, Kunsthaus Zurich and Museum Folkwang, Essen (2008), Empty The Pond To Get The Fish, MUMOK, Vienna (2008) UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005), Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (2005), Camden Arts Centre, London (2005), Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona (2005) and MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, Massachussetts (2003).
More on Runa Islam
| Artworks | |
 | I 4 Images |
 | II 4 Images |
 | III 3 Images |
 | V 4 Images |
 | VI 4 Images |
 | VII 4 Images |
 | VIII 4 Images |
 | IX 3 Images |
| Videos/Audio | |
 | Runa Islam, White Cube Hoxton Square 2008 Video |
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Runa Islam by Willem de Rooij | |
| Time takes a cigarette by Sara Arrhenius | |
| Q&A by Tine Fischer | |
| Exhibitions | |
| featuring Tobias Putrih 5 Sep—4 Oct 2008 | |
| Time Lines 9 Dec—14 Jan 2006 | |
| Directors Cut (Fool for Love) 7 Mar—21 Apr 2001 | |
| Artist's Publications Available in the Bookshop |
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| Empty the pond to get the fish. 2008 | |
| News | |
| Runa Islam at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 19 Aug 2010 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/... Hammer Museum, Los Angeles | |
| http://www.contour2005.be/U... Contour 2005, 2nd biennal for video art | |
| http://www.kopenhagen.dk/fi... kopenhagen.dk | |
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