Arts at CERN

In a career spanning nearly five decades, Leslie Thornton has produced an influential body of work in film and video

Her early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions as a student in the 1970s fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Engaging these themes within a focused survey, Thornton’s List Center exhibition will mark the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive presentation to date.

Her work has been exhibited and widely screened internationally at: documenta 12, Kassel; The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and Artists Space in New York; Tate Modern and Raven Row in London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; and at the Rotterdam, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York Film Festivals, among many others. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions have taken place at Kunstverein Nürnberg (2020); Malmö Konsthall (2019).

Belonging to two distinct artist generations and contexts, Leslie Thornton and artist James Richards joined a shared residency at CERN to develop their first collaborative project, Crossings, in 2016. Thornton conducted several more visits to the Laboratory in 2018 and 2019.