This weekend the Ruya Shop is screening Bruce Naumann’s Clown Torture (1987).
Location: Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad
Time: 10am – 2pm
Date: Friday 28 December – Saturday 29 December
For the past 50 years, the American artist Bruce Nauman has worked in every conceivable artistic medium, dissolving inherited genres and inventing new ones in the process. His expanded notion of sculpture admits wax casts and neon signs, bodily contortions and immersive video environments. His piece Clown Torture is a four channel video installation with sound chronicling the absurd misadventures of a clown, who is played by the actor Walter Stevens. Each channel depicts a narrative sequence that is played in perpetual loops: the clown incessantly screams “No!” while jumping, kicking, or lying down; he struggles to balance a fish bowl on the ceiling with the handle of a broom; he repeatedly opens a door that is booby-trapped with a bucket of water, which falls on his head; and finally, he succumbs to the terror of a seemingly inescapable nursery rhyme.