ATOM EGOYAN: Steenbeckett

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Atom Egoyan, "Steenbeckett," 2002

installation at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, Ego Film Arts

The MacKenzie Art Gallery, in collaboration with Strandline Curatorial Collective and University of Regina, brings to North America, for the first time, Atom Egoyan’s most important lens-based installation work to date. The extraordinary result of an Artangel commission installed at the former Museum of Mankind (London, 2002), Steenbeckett immerses the viewer in a continuously moving web of 35mm film strung floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Driven by a Steenbeck editing table, the 2,000-foot film loop features the last reel of Egoyan’s brilliant film adaptation of the Samuel Beckett play Krapp’s Last Tape. With the wear and tear produced by each rotation of celluloid through the system, the whole work edges, like Krapp himself, inexorably toward extinction. For the MacKenzie installation, Egoyan takes advantage of noise cancelling headphones to project a digitally remastered version of the film within the same space as the meandering and chattering film loop. Steenbeckett masterfully contemplates the nature of memory and its recording while foregrounding Egoyan’s fascination with new and obsolescent technologies and the analogue/digital divide.

About Atom Egoyan

Atom Egoyan is one of the most celebrated contemporary filmmakers on the international scene. His body of work—which includes independent features, television, theatre, music, opera, and art installations—delves into issues of memory, displacement, and the impact of technology and media on modern life. As a lens-based installation artist, Egoyan has contributed to the development of expanded cinema through his work on trauma, memory, and witnessing as they relate to historical events, such as the Armenian Genocide and diaspora, and more personal histories involving desire, lost love, and family relations.