Wu Tsang
La gran mentira de la muerte
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Barcelona

The question of whether fictional characters can be liberated from their narratives, contexts, and genres drives much of Wu Tsang’s recent film and installation work. The New York- and Berlin-based artist’s silent film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), for example, emphasizes the relevance of the Transatlantic slave trade to the novel’s central saga, while her related work, Of Whales (2022), releases the mammal protagonist into an immersive, real-time video installation. La gran mentira de la muerte (2024), a site-specific video installation for the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’s (MACBA) Capella chapel, also references a 19th-century European work: the opera Carmen.