Don Foresta XIIe Biennale de Paris

The 12th Paris Biennale was the second slowscan event I organized in 1982, a year after the exchange with MIT. Ronald Reagan had just become president and one of the first things he did was cut all spending for international cultural events. Georges Boudaille, head of the Biennale asked me to imagine an American participation to replace the one lost. I proposed a slowscan exchange linking 11 American photographers with 12 photographers from France.

Images were exchanged over three weeks, photographed and hung on the walls of the Fee de l’Electricité room in the Museum of Modern Art, Ville de Paris. Two of the artists on the American side are show here, Meridel Rubenstein, who orgnanzed the US side and Bernd Kracke who was at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. The bad polaroids are of the Paris work-station.

Unfortunately, photos of the entire installation are in the archives of the Paris Biennale and are not unavailable as are the video tape traces of the exhange. The actual photos remained with the participating photographers.