Pope.L presents Reenactor at DLECTRICITY

Pope.L, a Chicago-based artist who has been making public interventionist art for over twenty years, will present Reenactor at Dlectricity 2017. A video artwork projected on the façade of the Detroit Historical Museum, the work will run continuously throughout the festival weekend, day and night.

Pope.L writes, “I call Reenactor my Civil War film but the war I’m referring to is any great trauma that marks the land and its people such that ghosts are spawned and made restless in memories that haunt our living landscape.” Live music performances by Marcus Elliot and Ben Willis will accompany the video’s soundtrack during festival hours.

If you visited the Detroit Institute of Arts’ 30 Americans show last year, you may have seen video footage of The Great White Way, a performance piece by Pope.L that addressed social injustice by documenting the artist make a 22 mile crawl up Broadway in Manhattan while dressed in a Superman costume, completed over the course of nine years.

This year, he’s been getting a lot of attention from the art world. He was a VIA grant recipient for Artistic Production based on installations at Documenta 14 and had a solo show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York. He also won the prestigious Bucksbaum Award at the 2017 Whitney Biennial for Claim (Whitney Version), an installation of walls creating a space covered inside and out with curing slices of baloney that raises questions about identity, community and healing. He will have a solo show at the Whitney in 2018.

Pope.L will also present Flint Water Project at Detroit artist-run gallery What Pipeline, on view September 7 through October 21, 2017. Flint Water Project is an art installation, a performance and an intervention that calls attention to the water crisis in Flint by bottling contaminated Flint tap water and selling it as an edition in Detroit. This week, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the project.

As per the Kickstarter description, “When Pope.L was asked by What Pipeline to do a commission for Detroit, he felt that whatever he did it should not re-victimize the city as had been done too often in the past. What if Detroit could be the hero and come to the rescue of another midwest city in need?” More information at whatpipeline.com (or @whatpipeline) #whatpipeline #flintwaterproject

Special thanks to the Detroit Historical Museum for hosting this project and to the Knight Foundation and What Pipeline for their partnership in bringing Pope.L to Detroit.