artist
Christian Marclay
USA / Switzerland / UK / Germany
For nearly 40 years, Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, CA, USA) has been exploring the connections between vision and sound, creating works in which these two sensibilities enrich and challenge one another. Marclay garnered international acclaim at the 54th Venice Biennale for his masterpiece video work, The Clock, for which he received the prestigious Golden Lion award.
Marclay’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including one-person presentations at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. (1990); the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (1995); the Kunsthaus, Zurich (1997); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); Muséed’Art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2008); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2010); Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2011); the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2019); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2022–2023); and the Museum of Modern Art (2024–2025).
Christian Marclay
Telephones, 1995
Video, running time 7:30 minutes.
Edition of 250 CM-32-V
Telephones is a seven-and-a-half-minute video montage composed entirely of telephone sequences borrowed from films. By stitching together disparate scenes of ringing telephones, moments of anticipation, conversation, and abrupt disconnections, Marclay creates a riveting score of disembodied voices and abrupt edits. The viewer is drawn into the rhythmic tension between each pause and ring, discovering how the telephone—a humble everyday object—becomes a cinematic stage for human connection and communication breakdown.
As a quintessential found-footage piece, Telephones exemplifies Marclay’s signature technique of remixing popular culture into new contexts. Sound and image share equal protagonism, orchestrating a playful narrative that resonates on both emotional and conceptual levels.
The work highlights a liminal space where voices and the ringing tones of phones traverse temporal and physical distances, bridging and severing connections in a fluid, horizontal reorientation. Its transitional moments underscore the delicate interplay between separate realms, capturing the resonant ecology of mediated human relations.
