Mike Crane
Troy, NY
Currently based in New York, Mike Crane is an artist whose multidisciplinary work examines patterns of standardized production using observational documentary methods and fictional staging techniques to reveal the human labor within these systems. Crane’s work has been exhibited at venues, biennials and festivals such as documenta 14, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Orgy Park in Brooklyn, The Berlinale Forum Expanded, The Bronx Museum of Art in New York and the Center for Contemporary Art Derry in Northern Ireland. Crane has been an artist in residence at the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, the Rupert Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania, the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Smack Mellon and Triangle Arts Association, both in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently a faculty lecturer in University of Pennsylvania’s Fine Arts Department.
From the Journal
- Mike Crane’s Teledrama “UHF42” Premieres in Berlinale Forum Expanded February 11, 2017
UHF42
Mike Crane is an artist whose multidisciplinary work examines patterns of standardized production using observational documentary methods and fictional staging techniques to reveal the human labor within these systems
Artist BioUHF42 is a six episode tele-drama set in the offices of Wattan TV, the longest running 24-hour news station in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. Each episode portrays one day of a continuous work week, blending scripted performances with documentary scenes of office life. The series follows the station’s managers, technicians and journalists as they act out a report on the rising levels of consumer debt. The city has experienced a surge in private bank loans over the past decade, forming a cosmopolitan island of prosperity. Parallel to these developments, Wattan created a dramatized series to report on the advent of the criminal justice system in Ramallah, providing one of the first scripted news programs of its kind in the Middle East. For the production of UHF42, Mike Crane worked with the writer and crew members of that series to script a new fictional drama about the credit system that has shaped the city over the past decade. UHF42 adapts the formal techniques of news production to investigate a period of rapid development, employing the station’s workers to probe the structures of public and private debt under military occupation.