BLACK SUN
Credits
2-Channel Video Installationstarring
Lena Herrgesell
Julia Hartmann
Willy Rachow
Klara Hoffels
and introducing Haluk Atalayman (as the Pony)
crew
D.P.: Shai Levy
Audio Technic: Julio Molina
Camera / Lighting Assistant: Gerlind Becker
Set Building: Haluk Atalayman
Still Photography: Felix Ensslin / Sue de Beer
Transportation / Graveyard Consultant: Chris Krönke
Production Manager: Titus von Lilien
Casting: Titus von Lilien / Felix Ensslin / Sue de Beer
monologues
Text for Black Sun excerpted from Closer and Period, novels by Dennis Cooper
music
Eternal Flame performed by Andy Comer, and recorded by Matthew Ronay
location
Filmed in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, 2005
support for Black Sun
provided by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Bill and Charlotte Ford
Additional support provided by the Outpost Cuts and Burns Artist's residency
Thank you to
Felix Ensslin, Jana de Beer, Shamim Momin, and Bill and Charlotte Ford
Run time: 23 minutes
Black Sun first exhibited at The Whitney Museum, Altria, New York March - June 2005
Curated by Shamim Momin
2005
Runtime: 23 Minutes
Excerpt from: Jeffrey Kastner’s ‘Sue de Beer, Black Sun’, Artforum, Summer 2005
Like Kristeva's meditation on melancholia referenced by its title, 'Black Sun' confronts issues of identity, memory, and longing. Stylistically, however, it probably has more in common with the phrase's literary source, a line by the eccentric nineteenth-century French poet Gerard de Nerval ("My sole star is dead - and my constellated lute / Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia. Nerval described his verse as the product of a "supernaturalistic" state of reverie, writing that "Our dreams are a second life"- a sentiment that might just as well serve as a motto for the engrossing "supernaturalism" of de Beer's work, and its use of uncanny distortions of time and place to evoke the anxious process of adolescent psychosexual awakening.