Past and present, history and amusement, reality and spectacle are conflated and distorted in Federico Solmi’s monumental media work, The Great Farce (2017). This immersive video is made up of nine video projections spanning the entirety of The Block Museum's largest gallery. In the multiscreen work, painting, drawing and motion-capture images are stitched together using digital technology to create a surreal universe.
Featuring a cast of time-traveling world leaders with a feverish madness for power, Solmi’s animation turns a frenzied, fun-house mirror to grandstanding historical figures. The Great Farce presents a sprawling send-up of empire-building as an enterprise, and a scathing commentary on our contemporary culture where spectacle and celebrity may be distractions from more sinister machinations, and where the speed of things contributes to the blurring of myth and truth.
Originally commissioned for the 2017 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt, Germany, The Great Farce is one of Solmi’s most ambitious works in terms of technical complexity, physical scale and scope of content. The work can be presented as an immersive gallery installation with nine projections, or a sculptural “portable theater” with embedded video that represents the content, spirit and aesthetic of the larger installation.
The Great Farce was first exhibited on the façade of the Schauspiel Opera Theater in Frankfurt Germany, and later adapted into a gallery installation for Open Spaces Kansas City (2018). American Circus, a work adapted from The Great Farce, was displayed across multiple electronic billboards in New York’s Times Square in July 2019 as a project of Times Square Arts.
The limited-edition work is part of The Block Museum's permanent collection, gifted by the artist’s studio in recognition of the museum’s 40th anniversary in 2020
This exhibition is supported by The Block Museum Science and Technology Endowment and the Constance and Dudley Godfrey Trust
