Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Marlene & Franz, 2017

This edition – made in collaboration with Giasco Bertoli – consists of two postcard format photographs. Each one is signed on the back in the style of pre-War cinema photographic studio portraits and features a portrait of the artist in the guise of Marlene Dietrich and Franz Kafka, as performed during the artist’s 2017 apparition—a series of live appearances begun in 2012—at the Collège de France in Paris.

The work refers to Gonzalez-Foerster’s larger project M.2062, in the artist’s words, a prospective and fragmented opera that incorporates “not only literature, movies and music but also quotations, adaptations, juxtapositions, games, and identities. It is an opera with author-characters such as Emily Brontë and Edgar Allen Poe, fictional characters drawn from movies and novels, and also real people who inspired extraordinary films that feature opera.”