Marco Brambilla through January 15, 2025
bitforms gallery | 131 Allen Street
Debuting less than two weeks after the election polls closed, Marco Brambilla's Limit of Control, 2024, plays as prescient commentary—or, maybe, like a cinematic trailer of what's to come. News channel talking heads, flags, marches, mass protests, riot police in formation, politicos at podiums, sirens, gunshots, mass arrests, smoke, ticker-tape confetti, smashed glass, car crashes, and fire: this traces, more or less, the choreographed frenzy and crescendo of violence that the Italian-born Brambilla packs in the three-minute title work of his new show.
Shown across two massive screens in the narrow corridor of the gallery, you have no choice but to get up close to the projected expanse and its onslaught of images. Brambilla doesn’t make political prognostications nor does he moralize. Instead, he accumulates and collates clichés of moving-image storytelling so that we see them anew, concentrated in all their affective and manipulative glory. He cuts together more than 1,600 clips, sourced from his vast archive of digitized Hollywood and other movies, into these 180 seconds. The resulting video is at once maddening and seductive, like an annihilating orgasm of cinema.
