Gerard & Kelly

PROJECT
Gerard & Kelly’s Bright hours explores and speculates on the relationship between the famed Swiss-French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), known as Le Corbusier, and American dancer Josephine Baker (1906–75). It is the latest work in their series Modern Living, 2016, which places bodies, relationships and architecture into dialogue. In Bright hours Baker, depicted by St Louis– born dancer Emara Neymour-Jackson and Le Corbusier played by French actress Jeanne Balibar, appear in relation to the architect’s iconic modernist apartment block La Cité Radieuse in Marseille. With a soundtrack composed and performed by American singer Moses Sumney, Bright hours uses choreography to explore gender, race, sexuality and modernism’s real and imagined legacy.

ABOUT
American-born, Paris-based artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly have collaborated for nearly two decades on performance, choreography, video and installation. They apply conceptual strategies to art and dance to examine themes of memory, history, sexuality and identityy, often set against specific architectural spaces. The duo’s first museum survey exhibition, Ruins, was held at the Carré d’Art – musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes in 2022–23. They have presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the MAK Center, Los Angeles; and the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2023

Courtesy of the artists and Marian Goodman Gallery