For more than three decades, New York based artist Matthew Barney has developed a singular body of work across film, performance, sculpture, photography, and drawing. His films, including The Cremaster Cycle (1994 – 2002), Drawing Restraint (2005), River of Fundament (2014), Redoubt (2019) and Secondary (2023), bring together elaborate mythologies, physical action, and a sustained exploration of how bodies encounter resistance, transformation and constraint. These cinematic worlds extend into sculptures and installations including drawings and materials such as petroleum jelly, metal, and ceramic. Barney’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Schaulager in Basel/Münchenstein, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.

For this Art Taaalkssss, Barney returns to The Cremaster Cycle to consider how the work has continued to shift in meaning since its creation. The artist will reflect on its place between art and cinema, and on how its forms, materials and mythologies speak to the cultural, political and technological conditions of the present. The talk will offer a rare opportunity to revisit this landmark work with the artist and to hear how he understands its evolving life more than two decades after its completion.