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An installation and lecture by Peter Greenaway that reconstructs the biography of one man and the story of a century
Slought is pleased to announce "Tulse Luper in Philadelphia," the next installment of the The Tulse Luper Suitcases. The project takes the form of a city-wide collaborative installation on the occasion of Peter Greenaway's visit to Philadelphia in April 2012. Essentially, Slought Foundation will exhibit 92 suitcases in our small storefront, as well as some fake, apocryphal & unauthenticated suitcases. It is imperative that these 92 suitcases correspond to the list provided to us by Peter Greenaway, especially suitcase #7 which features Vatican Pornography.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases reconstructs the life of Tulse Luper, a professional writer and project-maker, caught up in a life of prisons. Luper was born in Newport, Wales in 1911. He was in Moab, Utah in 1928 when Uranium was 'discovered' there, and he was in Antwerp in 1939 when the Germans invaded Belgium. He was in Rome when the Americans arrived in 1944, and he met Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest in 1945 and followed him to Moscow in the 1950s. He was at an East-West German checkpoint in 1963, and presumably last heard of in 1989. His life is reconstructed from the evidence of 92 suitcases found around the world - 92 being the atomic number of the element Uranium. These suitcases tell Luper's story from 1928 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, sketching not so much the biography of one man as the story of a century related through some of its key events.
Screenings at Slought
Tuesday, April 10th, 5pm and 8pm
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover (1989), and Rembrandt's J'accuse (2008)
Lecture at Penn (Meyerson Hall)
Wednesday, April 11th, 6pm
Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema
"The cinema died on September 31st, 1983, when the zapper or
remote-control was introduced into the living-rooms of the world."
Conversation and opening at Slought
Friday, April 13th, 6:30pm
The Tulse Luper Suitcases & Goltzius and the Pelican Company
Conversation with Jean-Michel Rabaté and Alan Singer follows
Email us if you are able to lend us a used and tattered suitcase (from before 1989) for one month. The pick-up date for their retrieval will be April 21st from 4-6pm.
Your suitcase will be inventoried upon arrival, inspected according to the TSA screening process, and returned to you at the close of the exhibition. Workshops are being held at Slought for those interested in brainstorming contents for the suitcases that correspond to those listed below. Information about the Tulse Luper Suitcases and Tulse Luper's life is also available online.
Special thanks to the following suitcase providers: Sarah Hunt, Grisha Zeitlin, Sherry Epstein, Jean-Michel Rabate and Patricia Gherovici and their daughter Sofia, Sandra Kowalewski, Sheila Mayne, Nora Humpage, Diedra Krieger, Alison Dilworth, Sean Stoops, Scott Kip, Meredith Sellers, Virgil Marti, Evi Numen, John Darling-Wolf, Andreea Bailuc, Mimi Cheng, JL Schnabel, K Grossman, Adimu Kuumba, Jacqui Bowman, Robert Hicks, Paul Romano, Christina Cantrill.
Peter Greenaway was born in Wales and educated in London. He trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his making of installations for the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona, the Boymans -van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Hoffburg in Vienna, the Brera in Milan and the Armory in New York. He has worked and collaborated with the composers John Cage, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens, Louis Andriessen, Goran Brekovic, Giovanni Sollima and David Lang, and toured the world with his Tulse Luper Suitcases VJ Show.
He has regularly been nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books and written for the theatre and opera. His first feature film, The Draughtman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as one of the most original and important film makers of our times, a reputation consolidated by the films, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and The Pillow-Book and most recently by Nightwatching and the documentary Rembrandt's J'Accuse.