Sadie Benning – Shared Eye

This richly illustrated volume offers an in-depth look into artist Sadie Benning’s exhibition Shared Eye, presented at the Renaissance Society and the Kunsthalle Basel. The forty mixed-media panels in Shared Eye defy easy categorization: they include collage, painting, photography, and sculpture. The seriality of the installation also nods to the artist’s history with the moving image. Throughout the 1990s, Benning created an extraordinary body of experimental video work, improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera. More than two decades later, in Shared Eye we see the handmade aesthetic, grainy imagery, and durational logic of Benning’s early videos take on different forms to correspond to our current moment. The catalog documents the exhibition in full color, and it features an interview between the artist and Julie Ault, essays by John Corbett and Christine Mehring, and an introduction by the Renaissance Society’s executive director, Solveig Øvstebø, and Elena Filipovic, director of Kunsthalle Basel. These texts provide illuminating framework for the exhibition and key insights into how Benning pushes the limits of abstraction in response to our present political climate.