Subterrestrial Cinema

In conjunction with Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim, collection artist Lucy Raven has conceived a new live work that explores the key role of the museum’s founders in the formulation and propagation of nonobjective film in the early 20th century. Presented in the museum’s Lower Level theater, Subterrestrial Cinema carries audiences on a journey into a truly underground cinema, weaving animations and materials from the Guggenheim’s archives together with new text, films, and sound. Spiraling outward from the museum’s origins, it creates an alternate prehistory of cinema, linking science fiction, effects technology, and the legacies of abstract film.