Grand Paris Texas: 5 December 2014 – 11 January 2015
Movie Mountain: 16 January – 22 February 2015
Giant: 6 March – 3 May 2015

Teresa Hubbard (Irish/ American/ Swiss, born in Dublin, Ireland 1965) / Alexander Birchler (Swiss, born in Baden, Switzerland 1962) have been working collaboratively in video, photography and sculpture since 1990. Their work invites suggestive, open-ended reflections on memory, place and cinema.

IMMA will host their recently completed trilogy of films in a changing display from December 2014 through to Spring 2015. The exhibition will feature all three projects in the completed trilogy and will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Each component of the trilogy interweaves and unpacks layers of cinema history. The first part, completed in 2009 and titled Grand Paris Texas, considers simultaneously the physical and social space of a dead cinema, a forgotten song and the inhabitants of a small town. Running from 5 December 2014 – 11 January 2015, the film connects three seminal movies of the southwest: Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), Bruce Bereford’s Tender Mercies (1983) and King Baggot’s classic silent film, Tumbleweeds (1925).

Movie Mountain (Méliès), a two-channel video completed in 2011, explores the residue of cinema and social terrain around the site of Movie Mountain in West Texas and will run from 16 January to the 1 March 2015. Searching for the origin of the mountain’s name, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler embarked on a journey traversing the landscape of early silent-era film production and uncovered a possible relationship between Movie Mountain and Gaston Méliès, the lesser known brother and business partner of the famous filmmaker George Méliès.

Giant (2014), running from 6 March to 3 May, interweaves signs of life and vistas of a decaying movie set built outside of Marfa: the Reata mansion from the 1956 Warner Bros. film Giant starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. After filming was completed the three-sided facade was left behind in the landscape. Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler explore the skeletal remains of the set as seasons change, day turns to night and parts of the structure swing and fall off. Scenes of a film crew recording the current conditions are juxtaposed with a Warner Bros. office in 1955, where a secretary types up the location contract for the motion picture that has yet to be created.