Matt Saunders: The movies that were secret remain secret somehow and a nation forgets its pleasures

Artist Matt Saunders creates a project for the site—physical, historical and programmatic—of the Harvard Film Archive. Fleeting, hand-drawn shorts screen in the theater during the day when the Archive sleeps, while interventions in the displays and other crannies of the HFA deploy both still and moving image.

Screening daily Mon-Fri, 12 to 1 pm, in the Lecture Hall, free and open to the public.

Matt Saunders

Grounded in painting, Saunders’ work crosses boundaries between that medium, photography, and short animated films. Recent one-person exhibitions include the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, the Renaissance Society in Chicago and Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York. His work has been seen in group exhibitions at the 2011 Sharjah Biennial, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Deutsche Guggenheim, Aspen Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Sabanci Museum in Istanbul, and Artists Space in New York, and can be found in the collections of MoMA, SFMoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, UCLA Hammer, and the Harvard Art Museums. As a writer, Saunders is an occasional contributor to Artforum and Texte zur Kunst, among others. From 2007 to 2008 he collaborated with Katarina Burin, Philipp Ekardt, Heike Föll, and Jan Kedves on a project series and exhibition space – the “Institut im Glaspavillon”—on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin.