Jonas Mekas at Serpentine Gallery

On his arrival in New York in 1949, Jonas Mekas bought his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of the world around him. He quickly became a central figure in the burgeoning arts community, alongside friends and collaborators such as Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and film-makers Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren. This exhibition surveys Mekas’s work with moving images, poetry and sound, presenting a selection of film and video dating from the 1950s through to the present day. The show includes the world premiere of Mekas’s new feature-length film, presented as an immersive installation, plus stills, film portraits and ephemera will also punctuate the Serpentine’s spaces. A tireless champion of the new independent and avant-garde film movements, he wrote the ‘Movie Journal’ column in Village Voice, set up and edited Film Culture magazine with this brother Adolfas, and founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2011. Hero to successive generations of film-makers, Mekas continues to exert a powerful influence on the film world and beyond. Mekas brings a poet’s sensibility to the documentary style that permeates his work. His vision is unique in its ability to capture personal moments of beauty, celebration and joy. He has become best known for his ‘film diaries’, in which he records with great sensitivity, his day-to-day activities as well as those of his peers from the film and arts community in New York.