Due to protests taking place this week in Independence Square, the event has been rescheduled to Saturday, 20 December, at 4.00 pm.
We close the 2025 season of ‘Moving Images at Sapieha Palace’ with a screening of selected works by American artist and filmmaker Ericka Beckman. Working in New York since the 1970s alongside peers from the performance, video, and avant-garde music scenes, Beckman has created a distinct body of films that focus on games, sports, and play to interrogate the relationship between the private and public self. In Beckman’s films, conventional narrative is replaced with game logic, drawing characters into cycles of victory and defeat in which chance intertwines with the principles of closed systems. Through these works, the artist explores competition, power dynamics, and mechanisms of control in contemporary society, while also examining the potential for new possibilities to emerge from chaos.
Beckman’s work has been shown at festivals, museums, and galleries around the world. Her solo institutional exhibitions include: The Drawing Center, New York; M Leuven, Belgium; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; MAST, Bologna; MUMOK, Vienna; Secession, Vienna; Performa Biennial, New York; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Tate Modern, London; MOCA, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kanal Pompidou, Brussels; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Anthology Film Archives, New York. She has participated in four Whitney Biennials in New York. Her works are held in the film collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Walker Art Center.
Programme:
Reach Capacity, 2020, 13’
Based on her research into the strategy game Monopoly, Beckman’s film Reach Capacity (2020) addresses the current property crisis and gentrification in the US. ‘“Government and private corporate entities make decisions and play a structural role in what is fair game and what isn’t. The life of the individual is materially affected by these decisions. How can games create a possible alternative?’” (Beckman, 2020)
You the Better, 1983, 32’
Beckman’s first film, made on 16mm, and one of the earliest works in which game logic, rather than narrative, dictates the film’s structure. ‘A team of uniformed players, led by the artist Ashley Bickerton, performs the mechanics of a game servicing an off-camera betting entity, the “House”. Although the game keeps changing and players are swapped out, one thing remains the same, the “House” is hidden and controls the bets, the “chance” of winning is nil.’ (Beckman, 1983)
Cinderella, 1986, 28’
‘“Cinderella is a musical treatment of the fairy tale and is inspired by interactive arcade games. I have broken apart the story and set it as a mechanical game with a series of repetitions where Cinderella is projected back and forth like a ping-pong ball between the hearth and the castle. She never succeeds in satisfying the requirements of the “‘Cinderella Game”’.” (Beckman, 1986).
The works will be screened in the original language of English.