Event

Osvaldo Romberg
From Paradise to Paradise: A Hypertext about Love

From Paradise to Paradise: A Hypertext about Love (42min) engages the historical evolution of love through the impassioned affair of Carlos and Isadora, two life-size transparent plastic humanoids acting their relationship in a surreal world of Old Master paintings, jazz ballet, and a confrontation between Wagner and Jewish klezmer. Through the course of suffering, lies, deceit, and condemnation, the relation between love and guilt disappears and everyone goes to paradise.
In addition to the screening of From Paradise to Paradise, Romberg will screen his current work-in-progress, Jesus de Buenos Aires, in which Jesus Christ faces another inquisition but this time by Lacan and Freud. Set to tango music and accompanied by images of Giotto, Jesus de Buenos Aires offers another conception of Jesus as a dissident Jew as he attempts to rehabilitate the 1960s Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. This will be the American premiere of Jesus de Buenos Aires.

Osvaldo Romberg was born in Buenos Aires. He is a Professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation, where he has curated retrospectives on artists such as William Anastasi, Hermann Nitsch, and Dennis Oppenheim. He has also curated exhibitions on Faith at the Aldrich Museum and on Urbanism at White Box, New York. Before joining the curatorial team at Slought Foundation, his artwork was the subject of a 2001 symposium at the University of Pennsylvania and a volume of critical essays, Searching for Romberg (2002). He has widely exhibited as an artist at institutions including: Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Sudo Museum, Tokyo; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Jewish Museum, New York; the XLI Venice Biennial, Israel Pavilion; and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.