Cyprien Gaillard's Nightlife Video at Musée Tinguely

Cyprien Gaillard's 2015 video 'Nightlife' (14 min 56 sec) is currently featured in the exhibition 'Roots Canal' at the Musée Tinguely in Basel, running from February 16 to May 5, 2019. The 3D video, projected on an entire wall, offers an immersive experience with a looped sample of Alton Ellis's 'Black Man's Pride' ('I was born a loser'). It alternates between tropical vegetation filmed in Hollywood and slow-moving fluorescent fireworks against a night sky. Gaillard explores urban landscape degradation and post-apocalyptic meditations through references such as Rodin's 'The Thinker' in Cleveland, dynamited in 1970 by the Weather Underground; Berlin's Olympic Stadium, where Jesse Owens won four victories in 1936 and received oak saplings (the last survivor appears in the film); and tropical vegetation introduced for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, highlighting human transformation of territory and its eventual reclamation by nature. The video was previously shown at Sprüth Magers in Berlin in 2015, the Lyon Biennale in 2015, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2018 in the exhibition 'Au diapason du monde'.