Capital

Sarah Morris
Capital
2000
16mm / HD Digital
18:18 mins

Since the mid-1990s, Sarah Morris has been internationally recognized for her complex abstractions and films, which play with architecture and the psychology of urban environments. Morris views her paintings as parallels to her film – both trace urban, social and bureaucratic topologies. In both these media, she explores the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics. Morris assesses what today’s urban structures, bureaucracies, cities and nations might conceal and surveys how a particular moment can be inscribed and embedded into its visual surfaces. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in studies of conspiratorial power, structures of control, and the mapping of global socio-political networks.

Sarah Morris made the film “Capital” in Washington D.C. during the final days of the Clinton administration. It is a record of now unimaginable access to the center of power. “Capital” continues Morris’s investigation of the way we decode and therefore begin to understand the structured world around us.

“Capital”, first exhibited at the National Gallery in Berlin (Hamburger Bahnhof), draws a complex and layered city portrait. The Mall, the White House Press Office, the World Bank, uniformed members of the Secret Service, the Presidential motorcade, the Watergate Complex, the Kennedy Center, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the Pentagon, the daily activities of the President and an overall consideration of the city form a sequence of reflection points for her series of paintings. While her earlier paintings from New York and Las Vegas offered a new examination of the codes and structures of our urban environment, these new works introduce a revised mapping of power, desire, urbanism and design.