Nancy Holt's "Sun Tunnels" film on view at Centre de Arte Oliva in São João da Madeira, Portugal

Nancy Holt's 1978 film Sun Tunnels  is currently on view in the exhibition Feixe de Luz: Escultura Projetada, Cinema Exposto at the Centro de Arte Oliva in São João da Madeira, Portugal.

The exhibition's title translates to "Light Beam: Projected Sculpture, Exposed Cinema."

From Centro de Arte Oliva:
"Devoted to the formal and conceptual relations between cinema and sculpture, Light Beam: Projected Sculpture, Exposed Cinema, unveils a century of dialogue between the two arts and a mutual process of profound transformation, which has unfolded and became more complex throughout the 20th century to the present day. Film as a document that becomes a work of art, film as a possibility of staging and rendering sculpture performative, film as a possibility of combining opposites (material/immaterial; shadow/light; volume/ projection; ephemeral/perpetual), but also sculpture as an image-producing device are aspects that run through the exhibition."

The exhibition includes artwork by Babette Mangolte, Constantin Brancusi, Fischli & Weiss, Francisco Tropa, Hollis Frampton, João Maria Gusmão, Pedro Paiva, Lis Rhodes, Mark Leckey, Mary Ellen Bute, Nancy Holt, and Susanne Themlitz.⁠

Feixe de Luz: Escultura Projetada, Cinema Exposto is curated by Andreia Magalhães. 

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1978)
Installation view: Feixe de Luz: Escultura Projetada, Cinema Exposto, Centro de Arte Oliva, São João da Madeira, Portugal, 2022
16 mm film on HD video
Color, sound
Duration: 26 minutes, 31 seconds
Photograph: Dinis Santos
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Archived News

Holt and Smithson in the Press: October 2023

From the Ground Up: Women Artists of Land Art

by Tom Teicholz

Forbes, October 8, 2023

“Groundswell: Women of Land Art is a milestone exhibition that just opened at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, and that reassesses and reasserts the importance of a coterie of women in the art historical narrative of works that have been labelled as conceptual, environmental, sculptural, and even as performance.”

2023 Research Fellowship Presentations

Please join us as our 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellows share their research projects, findings, and ideas in progress. Each Fellow will present an online webinar for 30 minutes with a question and answer session to follow. Webinars are free and open to all. Please register in advance through the links below.

You can find more about each fellow's project and past fellows on our Research Fellowship page. 

Chapter Five of Tuesday Texts

We are happy to announce that throughout October we will be publishing a fifth chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson.

Every Tuesday we will publish a text to our website that includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.