Commissioned for "Catalonia in Venice" at last year’s Venice Biennale by curator Chus Martínez, Albert Serra’s monumental five-screen film installation sensually explores, in no narrative order, the stirrings of a society based on labour and sexual exploitation that is forced to develop new forms of technology in order to subsist.
23
Wavelengths
Singularity
Commissioned for "Catalonia in Venice" at last year's Venice Biennale by curator Chus
Martínez, Albert Serra's monumental five-screen film project, Singularity is a major work by
one of today's most visionary artist-filmmakers. In a series of interlocking episodes, Serra's
baroque, sensual epic weaves an era-spanning narrative that recounts the strange presence
of a group of people in proximity to a businessman and a mine. But the work's true subject
is the solipsism and complacency of a society founded on exploitation — a society forced to
constantly develop new forms of technology in order to subsist, and one where individual
desires, everyday habits and general corruption work against the very idea of a "renaissance."
Both a moodily unfurling 12-hour film and a jagged topography of febrile fragmentation,
Singularity is an exciting reconsideration of cinema's possibilities for self-realization, and
a confirmation of the importance of intellect, feelings, and sentience in our computer age.
ANDRÉA PICARD
Presented at 99 Sudbury, September 9–17. OPENING: September 9, 8pm–10pm.
Albert Serra’s new feature La Mort de Louis XIV also screens at the Festival as part of Wavelengths.
Image and artwork: courtesy of the artist and ANDERGRAUN FILMS