Atom Egoyan as You’ve Never Seen Him Before at The Mackenzie Art Gallery

What do you get when you combine a twentieth century avant-garde playwrite, a web of continuously moving 35mm film strung floor to ceiling and wall to wall, a Steenbeck editing table, 2,000 foot film loop and a celebrated contemporary Oscar nominated filmmaker? You get Steenbeckett, an immersive lens-based installation by artist, writer and director, Atom Egoyan. —Laura Busby

Cairo-born and Canadian West Coast-raised, Atom Egoyan is best known for his films Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Ararat (2002), Chloe (2009) and Devil’s Knot (2013). Among Egoyan’s many reoccurring themes in his films are the slipperiness of memory and modern life’s mediation through technology and media. 

Both of these themes are central to his 2000 film Krapp’s Last Tape, which Egoyan directed for Irish TV. The cinematic work is the focus of the installation Steenbeckett on November 5 to January 1, 2017 at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Krapp’s Last Tape was originally a play written by Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989), an Irish avant-garde novelist, poet, theatre director and playwrite. The play and film features the performance by a single character named Krapp.

The character sits at a desk on his 69th birthday, an annual tradition, with a tape recorder and tins filled with reels of recordings, all of his own voice, recounting each year of his life through his own words. 

Viewers of Steenbeckett will experience a poetic cacophony of noises, the chattering of the film reel swirling throughout the room as Krapp passionately listens and responds to his own voice from years earlier. The installation offers a meditation on the abstraction, materiality and texture of time, technology, immortality, memory, personal histories and cinema. 

Steenbeckett was originally commissioned by Artangel for the former Museum of Mankind (London, 2002) and was recently selected into the permanent collection of the Tate Modern, London. 

Mackenzie Art Gallery, 3475 Albert Street, Regina, SK. Gallery Information. 
M,W,F,Sa: 10 AM – 5:30 PM, Tu: Galleries Closed, Th: 10 AM – 9 PM, Su: 12 PM – 5:30 PM

Admission is by donation.

Image Credit: Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett, 2002. Installation at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, 2011. Photo: © Ego Film Arts