On view in the exhibition, Black Belmondo is a reworking of the last shot of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, where Jean Seberg traces the outline of her lips with her thumb. Seberg's gesture was appropriated from Jean-Paul Belmondo who has just died from gunshot wounds in front of her on the streets of Paris. Belmondo himself had appropriated the gesture from Humprey Bogart in one of Godard's playful references to Hollywood cinema. Adams extends the evolution of this borrowed gesture, by transforming it into a make-up application of traditional Black Face, suggesting a link to Seberg's real life identification with the Black Panthers.

IMAGE: Dennis Adams, Black Belmondo, 2008, Single Channel Video [152 Seconds, Loop], No. 1 from an edition of 3