Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 6

Born 1979 in Akron, OH
Lives in Queens, NY

In The Lesser Key of Solomon, Tommy Hartung creates a hallucinatory montage reflecting themes of racial inequality, power struggles, systemic violence, and religious fervor. The video, its title taken from a seventeenth-century demonological spell book, combines appropriated footage from the internet with stop-motion animations Hartung crafted in his studio using his own elaborate sculptures and sets. The film opens with a YouTube clip of a man addressing his webcam, describing the dangers of dark magic and meditating on human suffering. In the film’s second half, stop-action animations of flickering, colorful projections and otherworldly landscapes that reference occult imagery unfold against a soundtrack of a sermon by Nation of Islam member Leo Muhammad, in which he denounces the vast income gap between rich and poor, as well as pervasive racism worldwide.