AMALIE ATKINS: we live on the edge of disaster and imagine we are in a musical

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Tim Smith and Amalie Atkins

we live on the edge of disaster and imagine we are in a musical is an ongoing project by Amalie Atkins that brings together personal history, myth, familial storytelling, and imagined narratives. Combining film, cinematic performance, and installation, Atkins’ otherworldly stories are situated within the expansive prairie landscape. Generations of women—mothers and daughters, sisters, twins—transform the land into a site for the transmission of ancestral and familial knowledge. Like an ancient fairy tale, their narrative is fragmented and in a constant state of change, while the women’s ritual actions appear both banal and magical. Shaped by questions of personal and collective memory, and inspired by fairy tales, cautionary fables, dreams, and myth, Atkins reveals how the future is always in a state of being continuously reshaped by the past.

Curated by Natalia Lebedinskaia