Playlength: 30 minutes
Originally an installation: two channel video with sculptural elements presented by Art Production Fund in collaboration with the Park Avenue Armory and Sothebys
Monologue texts by Alissa Bennett

""The new 30-minute two-screen video grew out of a period of desperation in her life, after a year in which she made no art at all. At that time, in 2007, she was traveling almost nonstop, mostly between Berlin, where she lived for several years, and New York, where she is now an assistant professor at New York University.

In the winter of that year, the sun would set in Berlin before 4 in the afternoon, she said. She started venturing out only at night, riding the U-Bahn subway trains alone with a notebook, trying to write. Then for two months she locked herself in a room with only a desk, a chair and a blanket, rarely coming out.

When she did, she had written the basic script for “The Ghosts,” which follows three characters — a young woman, a record-store clerk and a money manager (played by Jon Spencer, singer and guitarist for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, whom Ms. de Beer persuaded to act for the first time) — as they seek the help of the hypnotist to deal with loss and longing.

In doing so, they conjure up ghosts — frightening-looking ones, who owe a visual debt to Ms. de Beer’s long fascination with horror films and, lately, to the particularly bloody 1970s Italian subgenre known as giallo. The ghosts seem to be challenging the viewer to decide whether they are mere memories or phantasms of a more substantial sort — or whether, in the end, it really matters." --Randy Kennedy, the New York Times, January 26, 2011

RESOURCES:

These videos are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to Sue de Beer. Used with permission of Sue de Beer.

Used with the kind permission of Marianne Boesky Gallery in NYC and Galerie Christian Ehrentraut in Berlin.