Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff was raised in Edinburgh, Scotland.[1] In 1980 she moved to New York, and a few years later she received an MFA in Film from Columbia University.[2] An early work, from 1986, was an apparently unauthorized film adaptation of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash, a short entitled Nightmare Angel that she filmed in collaboration with Susan Emerling.[3]

Beloff's work is heavily involved with history, and she is sometimes considered to be working in the field of media archaeology.[4] She often creates works that intervene in the past, binding together new and old technologies, concepts, and materials in narratives that conflate fiction and fact.[4] She is especially interested in the history of psychoanalysis and the paranormal. In the 1990s, she created the web serial Beyond to play with potential intersections between mind, technology, the paranormal, electromagnetism, language, and desire. One of her most expansive projects is a series of works created around her imaginary early 20th century Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its "founder," Albert Grass, exhibited at Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc. in London in 2010.[5]

Beloff's collaborators have included John Cale (in a 1989 film Wonderland USA), the Wooster Group—especially actor Kate Valk—and cultural critic Norman M. Klein.[1] In 1996, the Wooster Group commissioned her to develop a satellite CD-ROM project inspired by their theatrical work House/Lights (which was itself derived from Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights). Beloff created Where Where ThereThere Where as a group of moving panoramas representing the technological development of the computer in the 19th and 20th centuries. Treating Stein's texts not as a story but as "a set of logical operations," Beloff used the texts as a kind of code controlling the movement of the panoramas.[6]

In 2012, in response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Beloff directed a version of Bertolt Brecht's 1949 play The Days of the Commune. Working with cinematographer Eric Muzzy, Beloff set the play in multiple locations around New York City, performing one scene a day in such popular gathering places as Zuccotti Park, an East Village community garden, and the steps of the New York Public Library.[2]

Beloff has published several books. DREAMLAND: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Their Circle (2009) details the society's history from Sigmund Freud's (real) 1909 visit to Coney Island up through the 1970s. Albert Grass: The Adventures of a Dreamer (2010) is a comic book prototype by the society's founder, Albert Grass. The Somnambulists: A Compendium of Sources (2008) is an anthology of essays and material that inspired a video installation examining the late 19th century psychoanalytical fixation on the idea of hysteria.

Beloff's work has been recognized internationally, with exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Pompidou Center (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), Site Santa Fe, and now Chicago.[1][4] She was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2009 Athens Biennale.[1][4] She received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (1997)[7] and has been honored by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003). She is a professor in the Departments of Media Studies and Art at Queens College, New York.[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zoe_Beloff.jpg

• Beckman, Karen. "Impossible Spaces and Philosophical Toys: An Interview with Zoe Beloff." Grey Room 22 (2006): 68–85.
• Gehman, Chris. "A Mechanical Medium. A Conversation with Zoe Beloff and Gen Ken Montgomery". Cinéma Scope 6 (2001): 32–35.
• Hendershot, Heather, and Zoe Beloff. "Of Ghosts and Machines: An Interview with Zoe Beloff." Cinema Journal 45.3 (2006): 130–140.

• Zoe Beloff website.