Meghan Marie Malar

Cosmopolitan

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Exhibition from December 06th -  December 20th, 2024

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Curatorial support: 

Silvia Russo

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The videos in “Cosmopolitan” began as stills, sourced from satellite imaging, generated with DALL-E, or pulled from the artist’s archive. Rather than centering performance, the work explores the image and its ability to express social and financial capital. The show’s three videos employ lower-resolution, censored, or imprecise images, presenting them asunstable and deceptively malleable vessels for appropriating urban contexts.

 

In “High-End Haunting”, a narrator expresses heartbreak through the language of luxury labels as it haunts the retail district of Kuala Lumpur. Images are blurred to obstruct access to their content, both for copyright infringement reasons and to counter the high-resolution, high-gloss way commercial spaces are typically presented. The images feelcensored—somehow illicit.

 

In “Map the Zeitgeist”, a narrator seeks to capture the zeitgeist embodied by Britney Spears’ late 90s hit “…Baby One More Time.” Set against the backdrop of Los Angeles in 1999, the speaker attempts to trace the impact of this pop cultural phenomenon but is continually confronted by the shifting urban landscape. The satellite image accompanying the text, which transforms the city into scientific matter, loses its precision as it becomesan affective map, glimmering and fading with the narrator’s recollection of chasing thezeitgeist through Los Angeles.

 

“Joan of Arc Arrives at the Hotel Intercontinental” is a series of DALL-E-generated images imagining Joan of Arc arriving at a luxury hotel in Geneva in 2005 to celebrate its renovation, captured in the style of paparazzi photographs. A narrator mines the images, attempting to decipher the motivations behind the icon’s involvement in promoting a €22 million renovation. The piece employs historical revisionism to conflate religious authority with star power and examines where sanctity resides in the 21st century.

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The voices in these works are AI-generated, enclosing us in an affective yet post-human world, where we are forced to engage with the consumer landscape in a vaguely uncanny way. The works in “Cosmopolitan” play with simulacra and the ceaseless quest for the “real” it engenders. Whether our narrators are reaching for real emotions, real encounters, or real significance, a falseness permeates everything, including the voices in which they express themselves.

 

Meghan Marie Malar is a French video artist and filmmaker. She studied at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, before assisting with documentary work in Seoul and Paris, and completing two artistic residencies in Berlin. She has interned at the United Nations Radio and Television Department in Geneva, and worked in script development for several production companies in Los Angeles. These experiences across cities and continents have shaped an interest in how metropolitan spaces function as societal portraits, ever-shifting documents of our relationship to clout, class, and capital.