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Wendy Bednarz's The Palimpsest Series

Press Release

The Art Gallery at NYU Abu Dhabi is pleased to announce the next show at its auxiliary venue, The Project Space. Opening on 18 October, photographic exhibition The Palimpsest Series will present an audio-visual experience by Wendy Bednarz, an Arts and New Media Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi.

This is the first time The Palimpsest Series, photographs from Sri Lanka, India and Myanmar, is being exhibited in its entirety and with the accompanying soundtrack of the Palimpsest Soundscape. It is apt that this exhibition debut in Abu Dhabi where the culture simultaneously embraces international influences and local tradition. Here, like The Palimpsest Series photographs, traces of tradition burn through layers of contemporary perception in a haunting combination.

Magnetic fields of opposing charges — movement against static, a dusty palate, a neon splash, tension and release, The Palimpsest Series invites viewers to lose themselves within textured dreamscapes and then it deliberately breaks this spell with shards of photographic realism.
The Palimpsest Soundscape, created with sound designer Garreth Chan, is in dialogue with the Palimpsest photographs. These sonic threads weave into a dreamy audio landscape, inviting the listener to create their own narrative by connecting disparate sounds; Tuk-Tuks, spinning bicycle wheels, rainstorms, cows, synthesized drones, processed spoken word, Indian chanting and advertising jingles are a few of the one-hundred-eighty-three sonic threads that are sourced from the same countries as Palimpsest photographs to create an immersive viewing experience.
Artist Wendy Bednarz said, “Each Palimpsest photograph is a compressed memory, my version of Chinese Whispers in which by retelling stories that I do not fully understand, I change information and rationalize according to my own beliefs, biases and cultural background. Memories and fantasies are intertwined, crossing over and interfering with each other, becoming enhanced and distorted with each recollection as I selectively composite each Palimpsest image to reflect my version of the truth, as if changing the lyrics to a well-known song.”

Wendy Bednarz: The Palimpsest Series
October 18 – November 06, 2017
The Project Space, NYU Abu Dhabi (inside the Arts Center)
Saturday-Thursday, 3-10pm

Details at the website: http://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/project-space/

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About The Project Space
The Project Space, operated by the staff of the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery and housed within the campus’ Arts Center, is dedicated to NYU Abu Dhabi community projects. Providing a platform for experimentation and exploration, the Project Space gives priority to exhibitions of the academic community, such as the annual Capstone Festival, semester-end exhibitions of student works, and faculty-curated exhibitions.

About the artist
Wendy Bednarz is a filmmaker and a photographer whose professional work engages multicultural narratives and has screened at venues worldwide including New York Museum of Modern Art, Montreal World Film Festival and Venice Film Festival and has garnered awards such as Cine Golden Eagle, Independent Film Award and Sundance Winfemme.

Wendy is Head of Film and New Media Program at NYUAD where she teaches film directing, screenwriting and production courses. Before coming to NYUAD in 2014 she taught at The Lee Strasberg Institute and was a full-time faculty member of New York University’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Undergraduate Film Program and NYU’s Tisch Asia Graduate Film Department.

Wendy is currently working on several projects including photographing the Ethiopian Omo Valley Tribes and developing feature film projects that reflect Wendy’s passion for telling transnational stories that challenge geographic and cultural divisions, emphasize a single human existence and take place in the Middle East and greater Asia.

Wendy (director/producer) recently completed the feature documentary, Burning Money, that is shot in Singapore’s Chinese community and explores the thousand years plus tradition of burning paper money and facsimiles of everyday objects to deliver a happy life in the hereafter. www.burningmoneydocumentary.com

Wendy Bednarz’s upcoming solo exhibition at the NYUAD Project Space, October 2017, The Palimpsest Series, includes large-scale photographs that inhabit spaces between abstraction and figuration and are shown with a new sound installation, Palimpsest Soundscape, to create an immersive visitor experience.

Wendy’s Fine Art Photography can be viewed at www.wendyjbednarz.com

About NYU Abu Dhabi

NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and research campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly selective undergraduate curriculum across the disciplines with a world center for advanced research and scholarship. The university enables its students in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and arts to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on humanity’s shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi’s high-achieving students have come from over 115 countries and speak over 115 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.