LYNN MARIE KIRBY: Produits de France
September 11 - 17, 2025
Exhibition: September 11-13, 2025
Screening: September 17, 2025 ⦁ 7:30 PM
THE FILM GALLERY
43, rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin 75010 Paris France
The Film Gallery is pleased to present Lynn Marie Kirby: Produits de France, the first solo show in France of the San Francisco-based artist and filmmaker.
“While living in Paris in the 1990s, I mapped the contours of my apartment, exposing 16mm film to the light of different rooms,” notes Kirby who in that era discovered the possibilities of working with the film to video transfer process as another recording tool. This period of performative “gestures in time” led to further experimentation with both camera-less filmmaking and incorporating emerging video technologies into her celluloid practice.
Displayed as a triptych across three flat-screen monitors, Scans 1–55 (1997) features a succession of digital scanning of her son’s baby clothes from his first year of life. In addition to video works, the gallery display includes a broadsheet created with her late friend and collaborator Etel Adnan in relation to their short video Back, Back Again to Paris (2013). For the exhibition, Kirby has created a new scent called Neuvième (2025), which alludes to the arrondissement she lived in and her sensory associations with this city. Guest curator Tanya Zimbardo will provide an accompanying essay for Lynn Marie Kirby: Produits de France.
SCREENING
On September 17, The Film Gallery will host a screening program featuring ten short films that Lynn Marie Kirby shot in France since the late 1990s when she lived in Paris, including the premiere of several new works that revisited earlier sketches.
- Photons in Paris: image encoding. 1 and 3, 1997–1998 (3:39, 2:56) digital video
This series emerged from a daily practice of shooting the interior of my Parisian apartment. Edits are determined by stressing the equipment to crash during import.
- Translation Series, 1997–2000 (1:57, 0:56) 16mm film to digital video
I exposed 16mm raw film stock to the light of our apartment by opening a film can and holding the film to the light. This exposure encodes on the film both the light of the site and the performance of a gesture. I mapped the contours of several different rooms in our Paris apartment.
Couloir, I walked down the hallway capturing the light and space, exposing film as I moved. The film is printed with different lights at the lab, emphasizing the layered space of the emulsion.
- L’ Entrée, I exposed film in the entrance foyer. The film is manipulated in the film to digital video transfer, using the transfer process as another recording tool.
- Frottage, 1999, 2025 (1:53) 16mm black leader to digital video
In 1999 I rubbed and scraped 16mm black leader across the parquet floor of our Paris apartment. I rubbed a cassette tape recorder around the floor as well, recording the rubbing sound and ambient sounds coming in through the open windows. The image and audio after transfer are manipulated in the digital domain.
- Out of Step, 2001 (5:03) digital video
Shot on a family walk beside the sea in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the piece has a three-part construction, a medium-paced opening, a super-fast central movement and a concluding adagio. Varying the speed on the digital deck as I inputted video into the editing machine, I inserted different speeds and froze images on top of one another.
- Verdun, 1999, 2025 (6:20) 16mm film to digital video
In 1999 my husband Stephen, my son James, and my parents went to visit Verdun. When I first lived in France in the 1960s we often went as a family to visit war sites around France. I exposed a roll of 16mm film to the light of the battlefield.
- gestes de la forêt, 2023, 2025 (9:07) iPhone video with live voiceover
In the summer of 2023 we stayed in a house with my mother and family in the Loire Valley. My son, James Kirby Rogers, and I walked to the nearby forest every day and improvised together.
- reflects sur les oliviers, 2012, 2025 (5:46) digital video
Olive trees and vineyards surrounded the house my parents rented for many summers near Cotignac in Provence. Inspired by the Mediterranean sun, Vincent van Gogh’s olive tree paintings and my friend Etel Adnan’s paintings on the same themes, I revisited the footage in 2025.
- Back, Back Again to Paris, 2013 (1:52) digital video in collaboration with Etel Adnan
Conceived as a subversive intervention when a collaboration between Etel and myself was rejected from the show Words and Places: Etel Adnan. This work consists of sentences from Etel’s Paris When It’s Naked (1993) containing the word “Paris” read into a speech-to-text program. Etel then intervened into her earlier, now “translated” text. This block of text became a broadsheet distributed outside the show with a scan code link to the accompanying video made up of mistranslations of the word “Paris” and outlines of Etel’s paintings on view inside the exhibition. Back, Back Again to Paris and two other collaborative works are included in our book Oracular Transmissions (2020; X Artists’ Books).
Following the screening, Kirby — who is staying in Paris this fall — will be joined in conversation with film scholar Charlie Hewison. Copies of two books published by X Artists’ Books in Los Angeles will be available at The Film Gallery: Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby (2024) and Oracular Transmissions (2020). Both books are available to order online in Europe through Les Presses du Réel.
Lynn Marie Kirby works in a variety of time-based forms, including film, public installation and performance, engaging our relationship to place, often with text, often with collaborators. Each of Kirby’s projects map emotional topographies, her most recent work uses scent, taste, and touch to explore expanded embodied perception beyond the visual and aural, to engage the public in the history of particular sites.
In France, Kirby’s work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou and Garage MU in Paris and Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; a collaborative installation with Trinh T. Minh-ha was featured in Manifesta 13 in Marseille, France. She has exhibited internationally and nationally at Fei Contemporary, Shanghai; Bio Paradis, Reykjavik; The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Getty Institute, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley; KADIST, Cushion Works, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, among other venues and in showcases in Italy, Turkey, Spain, Brazil, and Mexico. Kirby's films and videos have screened at festivals around the world, including Oberhausen, Toronto, London, and Athens. Canyon Cinema, who distributes Kirby’s 16mm and digital films, recently co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque the survey Lynn Marie Kirby: the insufficient frame. Kirby is a member of the international Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN). Kirby is Professor Emerita of Fine Arts and Film at the California College of Arts, where she taught for forty years and received her MFA in Creative Writing. After studying in Paris, Stockholm, and Cambridge, Kirby received her BFA in Sculpture and MFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute. Kirby lives and works in San Francisco, California where she has created site-responsive projects in various neighborhoods.