Since 2013, A&O Shearman (known as the Allen & Overy until May 1, 2024) has collaborated with Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, supporting the museum's collection through the donation of works video of national and international artists. Since 2019, the collaboration has been strengthened by continued donations as well as the creation of a curatorial research grant within the Mudam team, focused on the field of moving images and new technologies. For the 2024 edition of Private Art Kirchberg, A&O Shearman will present highlights from its partnership with Mudam, and will also offer a series of artistic activities for the public.

Sky Hopinka
Kicking the Clouds, 2021

16mm to HD video, stereo, couleur, son, 15 min 35 sec.

What are the things that define identity, and what are children and grandchildren given to take with them on their journey through life? What role does language and speech play, and what happens when a language is prohibited from being spoken? A poetic exploration of the filmmaker’s Indigenous origin and mother tongue. The setting and starting point is an audio recording that the filmmaker’s mother once made with her own mother – in an attempt to learn the almost forgotten Pechanga language from her.

Su-Mei Tse together with Jean-Lou Majerus
Vertigen de la Vida (dizziness of life), 2011

HD Video loop, colour, sound, 9 min. 20 sec.
Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

The film is a continuation of works by Su-Mei Tse exploring nostalgia and the recollection of blurred memories. Inspired by one of the first Dada movies, Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison (1923), Tse interprets these impressions through images and sounds of a moving carousel at night. Tse collaborated with composer Giancarlo Vulcano on the score to further emphasize the idea of blurred and intangible memories with the texture of an ongoing circular flow.

Julika Rudelius
Forever, 2006

HD double projection, colour, sound, 16 min. 51 sec.
Collection Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

In Forever (2006), Rudelius interviews five well-off mature women in the gardens of their summer homes in upstate New York. These women pose by their swimming pool while answering Rudelius' questions – which the audience does not hear – sharing their ideas of happiness, beauty, aging and privilege. The monologues are punctuated by moments where the women take their self-portraits with a Polaroid. We observe in the resulting video a tension emanating from the contradictions inherent in the social position of the characters: their status and wealth being inseparable from their ability to appear young and beautiful. Although Rudelius's questions display the vanity of these women, there is also compassion: these portraits of women reveal how their identities have been impacted by the society in which they live.