Haunted : Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance

Of the many many shows we want to go see, this is among the top 5. The Guggenheim's new show Haunted is organized around a series of formal and conceptual threads that unfold through the exhibited artworks: Appropriation and the Archive, Documentation and Reiteration, Landscape, Architecture and the Passage of Time, Trauma and the Uncanny.

Much contemporary art seems haunted by the apparitions that are reanimated in reproductions, performance, and the virtual world. By using dated stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise irrecuperable past. Haunted examines myriad ways photographic imagery appears in recent practice and in the process underscores the unique power and melancholy of all recording methods. It documents a widespread contemporary obsession with the past, both collective and personal. The artworks in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series to sculptures, paintings, and site-specific installations that make use of photographic elements, as well as to videos, films, sound recordings, and performances. While much of the art on view has been created since 2001, the show traces the extensive incorporation of photography into the art scene since the 1960s, always with an eye toward the distinctive relationship between passing time and the various modes of image and sound reproduction.
-Overview from the Haunted site

View the exhibition online here and more importantly let's all go see it.

You can also read Roberta Smith's review from the NYT here.