Claudia Bitrán ‘Titanic’ installation comes to NYC
Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York presents “Titanic, A Deep Emotion,” a solo exhibition, installation, and film by Claudia Bitrán. This marks the awaited New York City premiere of her remake of Titanic (1997) and the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition opens Friday, February 20th, and will be on view through March 28th. The artist will be present at the opening reception.
For more than a decade, Claudia Bitrán has been remaking James Cameron’s “Titanic” through an extensive collaborative process that spans film, painting, sculpture, drawing, animation, performance, and scenography. Using lo-fi materials and deliberately visible production methods, Bitrán meticulously reconstructs the original film scene by scene at an intimate scale through DIY processes and spontaneous casting. The project has involved more than 1,400 participants across the United States, Chile, and Mexico, who have contributed as actors, crew members, and collaborators, allowing the work to take shape and evolve through collective labor and improvisation.
Rather than striving for cinematic realism and illusion, “Titanic, A Deep Emotion” embraces its artifice and foregrounds its process. Cardboard props, painted backdrops, and makeshift environments remain exposed, while characters and scenes transition seamlessly between animation and live action.
Bitrán plays the leading role of Rose throughout the film, as the remaining cast shifts among a multitude of friends, volunteers, family members, and people recruited in public spaces. The process treats the blockbuster not as a fixed script, but as raw material—something to be disassembled, replayed, and reconfigured through innovation, repetition, and communal participation.
For its New York City premiere, “Titanic, A Deep Emotion” is presented as both film and installation. Paintings, sculptural props, drawn storyboards, hand-written notes, painted scene stills, and material remnants extend the work into the gallery space, framing the screening and emphasizing the film’s construction. Its kitsch and self-crafted components serve as commentary on the excess behind pop culture phenomena and are a timely metaphor for the perils of human hubris.
About the Artist
Claudia Bitrán (b. 1986, Boston, MA) works primarily in painting and video, frequently using DIY aesthetics to catapult herself into the hyperbolic world of social media and pop productions. Through labor, play, humor, and experimentation, she often deconstructs, rewrites, and represents mega-spectacles, injecting countless alternative emotional registers into these highly calculated spaces. The artist holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013) and a BFA from the Universidad Católica de Chile (2009).
About the Gallery
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development, and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Our program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art. Education and audience engagement are central to our mission.
Cristin Tierney Gallery is a member of the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America).
