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Aura Los Angeles (trailer), 2020, HD video, stereo sound, 0:33 minutes © Dominik Krauss
Aura Los Angeles is a documentary short film of closed art venues across the city during the pandemic in spring 2020. It captures the locked facades of project spaces, art galleries and museums, collaged with scenes from empty and dystopian cityscapes. ‘Aura’ here is drawn from Walter Benjamin’s critique of the mechanical reproduction of art, in which he defines aura as ‘a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’. 1 Although out of sight and out of reach
As strange as it might seem under the current circumstances, gallery closures are not entirely foreign in the canon of art history. Experimental gallery closures and interventions have been its own stream of practice within conceptual art from the 1960s onward. Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery (1969) involved the closing of Eugenia Butler (Los Angeles), Art & Project (Amsterdam) and Galleria Sperone (Turin) for the duration of his exhibition, extending Yves Klein’s legacy of ‘empty galleries’ into physical ina
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