For one week Metro Pictures screens Olaf Breuning’s complete Home trilogy.
Each 30-minute film finds Breuning’s gangly, oafish star and alter-ego, played by Brian Kerstetter, traveling to far-flung locations such as Machu Picchu, Paris, Ghana and Tokyo in a state of personal and cultural confusion. Along the way Kerstetter, who wears icy-blue contact lenses to reptilian effect, encounters local characters, finding himself in situations that are uneasily humorous. In Home (2005) the nameless character reimagines his life as a series of fantastical anecdotes from a hotel room at the famous Madonna Inn, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Home 2 (2007), which was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, follows him as he traverses the globe as a disoriented tourist. The third and final film, Home 3: Homage to New York (2012), produced with a grant from the Métamatic Research Initiative and premiered at the Swiss Institute, New York in fall 2012, tracks a raucous spree through the garish substrata of New York City.
Olaf Breuning has a one-person exhibition scheduled to open at the Paul Klee Museum in Bern, Switzerland in September 2013. His films, photographs, drawings and sculpture have been exhibited at the Migros Museum, Zurich; Centre d'Art Contemporain la Chapelle du Geneteil, France; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; SMAK/Museum of Fine Arts, Gent, Belgium; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York.