Transcript

Photo: Eileen Costa

Photo: Eileen Costa

 

The two film and video works presented in this exhibition, Transcript (2006) and Inaudible (2006), evolved from Jenny Perlin’s research into now-public FBI documents of secretly transcribed conversations from the Red Scare of the 1950s. Addressing the expansive net of espionage during the McCarthy era and the resulting paranoia about hidden enemies, Perlin’s work underscored parallels to anxieties surrounding privacy and surveillance in America at the time and offered insight to our current milieu. The videos are part of an ongoing body of work called The Perlin Paper, a multi-part project that takes its title from the name of an archive at Columbia University Law School. This archive contains 250,000 documents related to the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. For two decades after the Rosenbergs’ execution, the FBI spied on hundreds of people tangentially connected to the case. The archive is named for the artist’s relative, Marshall Perlin, a lawyer who forced the US government to release the papers in the early 1970s. This exhibition was curated by Matthew Lyons.

Supplemental Information

Time Out New York Listing [PDF]
New Yorker Listing [PDF]
New York Magazine Listing [PDF]
Press Release [PDF]
Object Label [PDF]
View images for this event (1)

Similar Events

Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors
Ann T. Greene, Fred Ho
See More: Literature, Music, Performance, 2000s
Poetry and Performance Workshop for Teens: Our Words in Movement Space and Song
Treva Offutt
See More: Education, 2000s
Marc Cary and Samita Sinha
Marc Cary, Red Baraat, Samita Sinha, Sunny Jain
See More: Music, 2000s
Hoofers’ House
DJ Reborn, Jason Samuels Smith, Rashaad Newsome
See More: Dance, 2000s