Joan Jonas's Transmedia Survey at MoMA Explodes Cinema Through Mirrors, Performance, and Ecological Entanglement

A major survey of Joan Jonas's five-decade career, "Good Night Good Morning," is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through July 6. The exhibition presents the artist's transmedia explorations of perception, narrative, and nonhuman actors, moving from early outdoor performances to recent installations. Mirrors feature prominently in early works like Oad Lau (1968), Wind (1968), Mirror Piece I (1969), and Mirror Piece II (1970), where performers carry full-length mirrors, fragmenting bodies and landscapes. Jonas's 1972 video Vertical Roll, featuring her alter ego Organic Honey, uses desynchronized signals to obscure the body, while Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972) shows the character interacting with mirrors and live feeds. The exhibition includes the 28-minute video Volcano Saga (1989), starring Tilda Swinton and Ron Vawter, based on a medieval Icelandic saga, and Reanimation (2010/12/13), inspired by Halldór Laxness's novel Under the Glacier, with a soundtrack by Jason Moran and Ánde Somby. A vast multimedia installation, Moving Off the Land II (2019), addresses ecological stewardship, incorporating drawings, mirrors, an aquarium, and videos featuring marine biologist David Gruber's underwater footage. The show contextualizes Jonas's works with photographs, notebooks, storyboards, and performance documentation, highlighting her interest in female archetypes, folklore, and diffracted representations of entanglement.