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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 Venice Biennale (2005), More than This! Negotiating Realities, Göterborg International Biennale for Contemporary Art (2005) and 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003). Solo exhibitions include 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 | |
 | Sculpture 3 Images |
 | Turn / Stare Out 4 Images |
 | Dead Time / Tuin 4 Images |
 | Parallel / Director’s Cut 4 Images |
 | Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot 4 Images |
 | Be The First To See What You See As You See It 4 Images |
 | How Far To Fårö 3 Images |
 | Time Lines 4 Images |
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Runa Islam by Willem de Rooij | |
| Time takes a cigarette by Sara Arrhenius | |
| Q&A by Tine Fischer | |
| Exhibitions | |
| Runa Islam 5 Sep—4 Oct 2008 | |
| Time Lines 9 Dec—14 Jan 2006 | |
| Directors Cut (Fool for Love) 7 Mar—21 Apr 2001 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.contour2005.be/U... Contour 2005, 2nd biennal for video art | |
| http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/... Hammer Museum, Los Angeles | |
| http://www.kopenhagen.dk/fi... kopenhagen.dk | |
 | Back to Artist Index |