As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium - and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.

The work originally conceived by the artist couple Hubbard / Birchler for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale re-constructs the life story of the American artist Flora Mayo. Mayo had a romantic relationship in the 1920s with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. While he is now one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, her work was de-stroyed, and her life forgotten. Hubbard / Birchler reanimate Mayo's compelling biography from a feminist perspective, combining reconstruction and documentation to create a multilayered form of narrative. The catalogue, produced for the current exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz, elucidates the research the artists engaged in and documents the installa-tion in an impressive manner