Why Galleria Objets Screens Films: Visual Art and the Moving Image

Galleria Objets is not a cinema. That is precisely why we screen films.

At first glance, it may seem unclear why film, traditionally experienced in the black box theatre, finds a place within a gallery aligned closer with white cube tradition. This February we hosted film-related events with collectives such as Young Filmmakers Society and Frame by Frame Cinema, both dedicated to bringing people together around the shared experience of watching moving images. 

But why at the gallery? 

True to its name, Galleria Objets primarily hosts static art objects; painting and sculpture traditionally structure the space. The gallery walls express a spatial logic in which works are positioned in relation to one another, and viewers move through a carefully curated field. 

What space is to art, time is to cinema.

Time, as the defining condition of film, was articulated by theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin, who debated whether cinema’s essence lay in montage or realism. Eisenstein understood film as the structuring of time through collision. Bazin emphasised the camera’s indexical bond with the world. Both positions share a central claim that cinema is not merely entertainment but an art of organising time. It is no coincidence that many films take temporality as their subject, just as so much visual art thematises space.

Screening film in the gallery brings the black box and white cube into dialogue. When we screen a film in this context, we introduce temporal structure into a spatially governed environment. The gallery, usually associated with circulation and movement between works, shifts into a different mode altering the habitual bodily relation to the gallery. This encounter reveals that space and time are not easily separable. On a Kantian view, they are the necessary conditions of experience. Without space and time as a priori forms, perception could not cohere into meaningful experience.

Beyond this spatial and temporal relation, cinema and visual art share an economy of attention. Both ask the viewer to enter, pause, and consider how visual information operates within conceptual relations.

Context shapes perception.

From a broader historical perspective, one might recall Hegel, who understood art as an evolving expression of collective spirit shaped by its historical moment. Where the nineteenth century located its highest artistic form in painting, the twentieth arguably found it in the moving image. To screen films in the gallery acknowledges that artistic media evolve alongside cultural consciousness. Contemporary visual culture is shaped by moving images that circulate constantly across laptops and phones, scaled down and consumed in distraction. Projecting film in the gallery restores lost notions of scale, duration, and collective presence. Thereby, film screenings acknowledge the centrality of the moving image in our cultural moment while resisting its reduction to short-form consumption. 

There is also an institutional dimension.

As commercial film distribution narrows around profitability, galleries increasingly provide space for non-commercial and experimental moving image practices. This affinity between cinema and the gallery is not incidental. Consider The Colour of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov: its tableaux unfold less as conventional narrative than as a sequence of composed images, each frame operating with the stillness and symbolic density of painting. Or the immersive video environments of Pipilotti Rist, where projected moving images spill across walls and ceilings, dissolving the boundary between cinematic projection and installation art. In such works, film already inhabits the spatial and conceptual logic of the gallery.

Accordingly, our screenings are curated with attention to placement, atmosphere, and dialogue with surrounding works, so that the moving image becomes part of the gallery’s spatial composition rather than an interruption of it.

Sincerely,

Galleria Objets