This is the first retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of Julie Becker (1972–2016). From her home in Los Angeles, Becker produced a body of installations, sculpture, drawings, photographs and video that explored psychology, cinema and materiality in relation to the city, returning repeatedly to themes of dislocation, displacement and refuge.
The exhibition includes Becker’s key installation work Researchers, Residents, A Place to Rest (1993–1996), on display for the first time in over 15 years. Through the uncanny doubling of real architecture and scale model and the dense accumulation of materials gathered through long research, this work reveals the transient lives of the occupants at the same time as suggesting parallel fictional ones. Becker was continually navigating truth, fiction and myth in her work; she once speculated that, ‘the history of recent art could be told as the transformation of the artist’s presence from belonging to a community with shared assumptions to one of idiosyncrasy (or even obsession, serious obsession) and a sense of quirkiness, ranging along a scale from hilarity to deep depression’.
Find out more about the Julie Becker exhibition from the ICA’s website.
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Installation view of Researchers, Residents, A Place to Rest (1993–96), Julie Becker. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York
Whole (Screen) (1999), Julie Becker. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York
Transformation and Seduction (still; 1993/2000), Julie Becker. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York
Untitled (2015), Julie Becker. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York
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