Johan Grimonprez

About

Artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez achieved international acclaim with his documentary film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), a collaboration with author Don DeLillo that tells the story of air hijackings since the 1970s and how these changed news reporting. With its premiere at Centre Pompidou and Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, the film eerily foreshadowed the events of September 11th and analyzed compellingly how the media participates in the construction of our perceived reality. In 2009, Grimonprez made DOUBLE TAKE, which targets the global rise of ‘fear-as-commodity’. It premiered at Sundance and Berlin, and traveled the international film festival circuit, winning several Best Director awards, the Black Pearl Award in Abu Dhabi and the New Media Grand Prize in LA. His film and curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum (LA), Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich) and MoMA (NY). His works are part of the permanent collections of numerous major museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Kanazawa Art Museum (Japan) and Tate Modern (London). In 2011, Hatje Cantz Verlag published a reader on his work entitled “It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards” with contributions by Jodi Dean, Thomas Elsaesser, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Slavoj Žižek. Grimonprez divides his time between Brussels and New York, where he now lectures at the School of Visual Arts. In 2012, Cinema Scope named him one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” in the world.