Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality extends NRO’s Culture Capture series towards examining desires for monumentality and its dissolution, pursuing fantasies of removal by morphing monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogrammetric capture and virtual manipulation, performing a sort of sympathetic magic to clear space for Indigenous futures.
Locke’s Way is the photographic path to knowledge, full of twists and turns, treacherously steep. What has happened down here? A family’s photographs tell us everything and nothing about the subterranean past. "One of the central questions of philosophy has always been: what can be known? Locke’s Way provides a vivid illustration of this perennial philosophical dilemma. In this short video, Donigan Cumming is preoccupied with the story of his older brother, who seems to have been brain-damaged and spent much of his life in institutions.
From The Files of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge is a series of video clips taken at the Pyramid Club, a seminal location for the East Village drag scene in the midst of the club's most influential years. While rummaging through a file cabinet full of event fliers from the Pyramid Club, an office worker in drag guides the viewer through video documentation of past performances at the club.
"In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron’s words, "meaning is set adrift"."
--New York Film Festival, 1997, Views from the Avant-Garde program notes
Here You Are Before the Trees is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
Here You Are Before the Trees traverses Indigenous presence in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the areas in-between. Each screen focuses on different homelands and their complex relationships with history, landscape, power and institutional means of oppression.
Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality.
This short animation explores various ways to narrate an incident that once took place in the mythical Hotel Carlton. Against images of the deserted hotel today, the artist sketches situations that evoke the rumors that once circulated around the place and the people who inhabited it.
This title is only available on Radical Closure.
In this video, drawing from Bob Dylan's song Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, layers of experiences circling loss and longing are overlaid between images of landscapes and movement. In the song, a stranger's listlessness and exhaustion are woven through and around Juarez, Mexico, and so too are these stories woven around original discontent and uncertainty as they move through an uneasy negotiation with the strangeness of the American pioneer spirit.
Commissioned by Brianna Matzke for The Response Project, 2018.
Filmed entirely in Sweden, VIEWFINDER is a surreal sound-film that entangles gestures of place, belonging, and monument. Informed by archival research, oral history, and folk stories, the film focuses on Black immigrants who have recently migrated to Sweden. These performers enact dance-like choreographies in critical sites across the coastal town of Varberg, generated in response to an absence of Black life found in the municipal archives.
All that burns melts into air as “All that is solid melts into air” by Marx and Engels brings us to an imaginary of the present time marked by the reality and urgency of global warming.
Shot by Mary Curtis Ratclif at the O.K. Harris Gallery on Prince and Green Streets, New York, this tape focuses on performer “Ricky Jay” as he performs card tricks at his magic table for an enthusiastic audience.
The house in the film is Maison de l'Armateur, "the ship owner's house", one of the few houses in Le Havre, France that remained in tact after the city was completely destroyed in the allied bombings of D-Day, 1944. The work deals with the desire to preserve and organize objects, and by doing so, to tell a specific historical tale. It also deals with nostalgia to a world that no longer exists, and perhaps never did.
Originally part of a multi-media installation at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, King Anthracite documents the lives, work, and early deaths of Lithuanian immigrants (including Kybartas’ ancestors) who mined the Pennsylvania coalfields at the turn of century. Oral histories of miners detail their impressions of the United States and the hardships they encountered, including black lung disease and other occupational hazards that turned wives into widows and children into orphans.
Each film in this series is a condensed experience of a feature film, a single 360-degree time lapsed shot in an empty cinema where the sound becomes a cacophony of past projections and the aural experience is closer to that of the projectionist than the audience.
Peggy and Fred meet up with Peter the Penguin, to once again make their way through the fragmentary remains of 20th Century American culture. They fashion a tumultuous, arbitrary world that teeters dangerously on the edge of nonsense and oblivion. The makings are familiar: technologies, accoutrements, and stories of our culture, leveled against an endless and disorderly horizon.
Sunstone tracks Fresnel lenses from their site of production to their exhibition in a museum of lighthouses and navigational devices. It also examines the diverse social contexts in which optics are implicated, contrasting the system of triangular trade that followed the first European arrivals in the ‘New World’ with the political potential seen in Op art in post-revolutionary Cuba.
The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.
Letters in the Dark was originally shown as a two-channel video installation, accompanied by photographs at the Benrubi Gallery, New York, in 2016. In 2024, Hall decided to make it available as a single-channel work. Its subject matter is the brief epistolary romance between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská.
With Cold Harbor, Donigan Cumming uses a minimum of elements to create a powerful anti-war message. Initially, the video seems enigmatic, almost abstract. An amateur Handycam moves tentatively around a hospital room, panning and zooming from the view out the window to the dark-skinned old man lying on the bed. The image is shaky, blurred, often out of focus. Off-screen, a radio or television blares the news.
Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) is an experimental documentary about "The Western Hostage Crisis." The crisis refers to the abduction and detention of Westerners like Terry Anderson, and Terry Waite in Lebanon in the 80s and early 90s by "Islamic militants." This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, U.S., French, and British political and public life, and precipitated a number of high-profile political scandals like the Iran-Contra affair in the U.S.
This Was Home is comprised of three channels, which present three generations of the artist’s family. On one screen Levy presents her maternal grandfather, Karl Ribstein, another shows her father, Yossi Levy, and the third presents the artist herself. Levy documented each of these protagonists on a journey back to their childhood city and to the home where they grew up, which they had not revisited since having to leave it in their childhood.
"On my mother’s side there are two lands I come from, separated by the Atlantic ocean, all those fathoms deep. The lands of my grandma and grandpa. I had been through the lands of my grandfather, that is where I still live. The now tamed prairies, missing their bison herds and fenced out into neat geometrical patterns. My grandma comes from a similarly colonized land, Scotland. Ruled by the British Commonwealth and forbidden to speak their language. . . I had never been to Scotland. And I wanted to see my Grandma’s traditional territory.
Three Tales was commissioned in the late 1990s by different international music festivals to reflect on 20th century life as the new century approached. It recalls three well known events from the early, middle, and late 20th century—Hindenburg, Bikini, Dolly. Each of these events reflects on the growth and implications of technology during the 20th century from early air transport to the current ethical debate on the future of our species.
A Walk with Nigel is a video essay that constructs a dialogue between two artists from two different times, between movement and stillness, between speech and silence. An archaeological study of a community, reawakening the archive in the present. A materialist study of streets and social relations.
Kipnis describes this tape as "an appropriation of the aesthetics of both late capitalism and early Soviet cinema—MTV meets Eisenstein—reconstructing Karl Marx for the video age.” She presents a postmodern lecture delivered by a chorus of drag queens on the unexpected corelations between Marx’s theories and the carbuncles that plagued the body of the rotund thinker for over thirty years. Marx’s erupting, diseased body is juxtaposed with the “body politic", and posited as a symbol of contemporary society proceeding the failed revolutions of the late 1960s.
