Cinema as (In)Visible Object

Abstract

Through a focus on Runa Islam’s installation Cabinet of Prototypes (2009–2010), but drawing on the work of Tobias Putrih, Janet Cardiff, and George Bures Miller among others, this essay explores the commitment to displaying the objectness of historical cinema and its filmic apparatus in contemporary art. It argues that in setting up tangible, specific ways to look at the medium of cinema, the artistic practice of artists such as Islam effectively offers a theorization of cinema itself for the age of its obsolescence. Art practices, such as Islam’s, that are simultaneously a kind of curation of cinema constitute not only a way of reflecting on the medium’s historicity, but also of experimenting with its possible reemergence as something other than its historical self.