Video work exhibited in 'Close - Ups, Contemporary Art and Carl Th. Dreyer', Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, (6th November - 1999 - 9th January 2000)

A selection of Billingham's early video work was exhibited in 'Close - Ups, Contemporary Art and Carl Th. Dreyer', Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, (6th November - 1999 - 9th January 2000) curated by Lene Crone and Lars Movin. The exhibition was a collaboration between Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contempoprary Art Center and Nifca (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art). Carl Th. Dreyer is widely considered a master of creating intimacy on the film screen. One of his characteristic features as a director was an extraordinary use of close-ups. In the film 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) the consistent use of close-ups led to a remarkably intensity, which remains startling even to this day and other work in the history of film making has used the close-up of the human face so radically. Today, the close-up is a well-known film technique, often used to get 'under the skin' of the characters, in order to grip the attention of the audience. The exhibition, Close-ups, focused on how contemporary art relates to the themes and the feelings which Dreyer expressed through the use of close-ups. By juxtaposing Dreyer's film about Joan of Arc with eleven other works of art (video, film, installation, photo), the exhibition explored how artists seventy years later gestalted the intimate sphere to portray human emotions. How did artists in the 1990s portray relationships between inner and outer life? How was intimacy captured in film used today in artistic expression? A fully illustrated catalogue was published for the exhibition with texts by Lene Crone, Lars Movin, Staffan Boije and Simon Sheik