The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg

Contact Tracing is an online screening programme bringing together works from Mudam’s collection of artist film and video, which make up one fifth of the museum’s collection. The selection reflects on our powerful ambivalence to ‘contact’ engendered by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as our increased awareness of the boundaries that protect and restrict us from proximity and presence. In our current global context, contact carries the risk of infection and necessitates its opposite: isolation. After more than a year of confinement and social distancing measures, concern oscillates between exposure to infection and social alienation.

As we examine touch and proximity in a new light, this programme explores the nuances of previously unquestioned behaviour. The feminist theorist and philosopher of physics Karen Barad has noted that even at a molecular level, contact is an ambivalent event. As the feeling of touch is enabled by opposing molecular magnets (or ‘electro-magnetic repulsion’), contact is actually a process of pushing away. While Covid-19 has shifted our conception of the complexities embedded in moments of contact, the works in Contact Tracing show how artists have consistently sought to expose the crowding together and pulling apart of how we live together, alone and in the world.

Contact Tracing begins with one of Jack Goldstein’s early sketches White Dove (1975), in which the frustration of unrealised touch is palpable as hands reach towards a skittish animal. A similar feeling of disconnection is manifested by Mark Lewis’s searching camera in Spadina: Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude (2009). By contrast, the documentation of an action by Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Sans titre (4 feuilles de papier A4, table (180 x 100 cm)) (2006), demonstrates the achievement of anticipated contact as two blank pieces of paper come together and pull apart.

David Zink Yi’s La Cumbia (1999) follows the artist’s hand as a joyous traveller over the landscape of his body while Su-Mei Tse’s landscape of sensory feedback in L’écho (2003) presents a musician performing a duet with her own music as it echoes off a mountain range. This mediation of contact by an instrument is also apparent in Fire Cupping (2016), an animation by Agnieszka Polska wherein the boundary between a hand and a body is maintained at the risk of being burnt. In Julika Rudelius’s Forever (2006), the surface of the body assumes focus.

The hand is also present in João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva’s A Tocha Humana (2007), illuminating the walls of a cave until a moment of touch snuffs out the light. Several other works show physical space being traced by the body, including a flamenco dancer’s steps in La Casa (2005) by Pedro G. Romero, and the memories contained within an artist’s studio in A Experiênca do Lugar II (2004) by Helena Almeida. In Beatrice Gibson’s The Tiger’s Mind (2012) the struggle of six characters to communicate and collaborate is contained by a Brutalist villa.

The experience of space is the basis for A Visit Home (2009), a series of exercises by Eva Kot’átková who records the arrangement of familiar furniture in an unfamiliar environment and the creation of models of past homes from memory. This sense of haptic memory is also present in Valérie Mréjen’s Portraits Filmés 2 (2003), which documents the artist’s friends recounting intense moments of interaction.

Contact Tracing is an online screening programme. For best viewing conditions, enable audio and use full screen mode as you watch the videos.