In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol – arguably the most influential artist of the late 20th century – a select number of his films will be on exhibit for the first time in Southeast Asia. Curated by artist Yason Banal and Geralyn Huxley, curator of film & video at The Andy Warhol Museum, this exhibition focuses on the artist’s seminal motion and moving pictures, from his structuralist masterpieces Empire, Sleep and Chelsea Girls to the conceptual experiments in portraiture such as the Screen Tests, Blow Job and Outer and Inner Space, as well as explorations into narrative, celebrity and archive via Imitation of Christ and Factory Diaries. The installation Silver Clouds, traversing cinema and sculpture, performance and philosophy, hovers above the exhibition.

From the time he obtained his first film camera in 1963 until his death in 1987, Warhol produced nearly 650 films that capture the cultural milieu in which he lived and worked as the cool and curious coterie of friends and acquaintances, hanging on and hanging out at his New York studio factory became the cast and the subject of his work. Warhol’s Cinema is unique; projecting from film’s grave with video transfers on to digital media, dexterous and shadowy, shy and shining, looming over and nudging Hollywood and avant-garde tastes with one minimal and durational serial-copy after another. Much like his paintings, sculptures and activities, Warhol’s Cinema inter-faces various themes, styles and worlds and has never been more powerful and illuminating – its phantasmatic glamour, perverse aesthetic and conceptual brevity continue to maintain and pass through contemporary pop life, lying between hellos and goodbyes, staying still and moving on in space and time.

Image: © 2012 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum