“E for Eileen” by Gerard & Kelly

2023 · color · FR · FR, EN / EN · 24’ · In competition · World premiere

Eileen Gray spends her last day in the house she designed and built. Her solitude is interrupted by the arrival of old friends who threaten to drown her in the past. This speculative fiction, shot entirely in Gray’s modernist villa E-1027, is the third in a series of films by Gerard & Kelly set in iconic French architecture.

Gerard & Kelly

American artists based in Paris, Gerard & Kelly (Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) have collaborated for two decades on performance, film, and installation, among other formats. Having collectively studied ballet, visual art, literature, and gender studies, Gerard & Kelly use conceptual strategies within art and dance to examine broader themes of memory and history, sexuality and subjectivity. Their questions are often set against a specific architectural space, pushing the related sociocultural and political precedents of the site into an open engagement with the artists’ work. 

Gerard & Kelly were both Van Lier Fellows of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and each received an MFA in the Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA. The duo’s first museum survey exhibition, Ruins, was held at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, France, in 2022–23. Recent solo presentations include Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2022); MOCA, Los Angeles (2020); Festival d’Automne, Paris (2017 and 2019); Pioneer Works, New York (2018); New Museum, New York (2014), and The Kitchen, New York (2014). Their work has been included in group exhibitions including the NGV Triennial, Melbourne (2024), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), and the Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), among others.

Works by Gerard & Kelly are included in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon; Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes , Nîmes; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.