Empire

Synopsis

Empire (2014) is a direct reference to Andy Warhol’s eponymous 1964 film, which consists of a single eight-hour-long shot of the Empire State Building. In Bacher’s film, images of the iconic skyscraper—illuminated by twinkling red, white, and blue lights—are fragmented through plexiglass prisms, turning a symbol of American modernism into something unruly, unstable, and fugitive. The images lose integrity each time they are refracted or reflected. Paired with a discordant soundtrack, this work creates a hallucinatory spectacle suggestive of an era of deep uncertainty, marked by climate change and sociopolitical turmoil. [Overview courtesy of MoMA]