Mikael Levin

The photographer Mikael Levin was in residence at Chinati in December 2005. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Europe and the U.S. and included in a number of publications. His past projects include War Story (1995–96), in which he retraced a journey made by his father, an American war correspondent, across Europe in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Levin combined excerpts from his father’s account of that trek with his own contemporary photographs of the concentration camps and battlefields of Europe. While Levin’s main objective in Marfa was to take photographs for an ongoing project about international border zones, his exhibition at the Locker Plant focused on a kind of solar cartography. Two linked works explored ways of encapsulating the sun’s progress across a contained space on a given day. Using two bullet holes in the Locker Plant’s front windows as reference points, Levin used tautly suspended pieces of multicolored string to track the December daylight’s procession through the room. The resulting sculpture acted as a sort of free-floating sundial or three-dimensional photogram. In a related work, on the Locker Plant’s west wall Levin displayed a series of photographs taken from a fixed point in Chinati’s Arena building charting the movement of sunlight through the space.

Mikael Levin was born in New York City and raised in Israel, France, and the United States. He has exhibited work at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris; the Instituti Francais de Thessalonique, Thessaloniki, Greece; the International Center for Photography, New York; the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany; the Festival International de la Photographie, Dunkerque, France; and at many other international museums and galleries.