Pride Goes Before a Fall / Beware of a Holy Whore / Mise en Abyme

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1971 film Beware of a Holy Whore charts a cast of characters as they gather on set at a coastal hotel on the Mediterranean and spiral variously into social and psychological disintegration whilst awaiting the imminent arrival of the director, the star and the production money of the film’s meta-film Patria O Muerto (“Motherland or Death”). Grounded in Fassbinder’s experience of working on his previous film Whity (1971), Beware of a Holy Whoreprovides a tempting analogy for the experience of living and working collaboratively in an era of permanent post-production and increasingly volatile economic constraints.

Relocating from 38 Greene Street to a new building in 2017, Artists Space will embark over the coming six months on a period of self-reflection, bringing into critical focus some of the social, spatial and economic factors underpinning art production today. First held at Artists Space in the summer of 2013, Pride Goes Before a Fall / Beware of a Holy Whore / An exhibition in two acts presented a series of artworks and performances around a facsimile of the film’s hotel bar at Artists Space Books & Talks. Mise en Abyme is a further redux of this format—a mise en abyme recurring, like a Russian doll in drag—presenting a new cast of protagonists. Some characters have returned, others won’t come back, but again Cuba Libres will be served.

Protagonists that will appear over the course of five evenings in July, include:

Raúl de Nieves
Werner Schroeter
Eve Fowler
Eve Essex
Topical Cream with Lafawndah, Quay Dash, MSHR, Black Quantum Futurism, Doss
Stewart Uoo
Morgan Ritter
Joey de Jesus
Dawn Lundy Martin