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.
A Child Already Knows is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same era. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make and made impossible in a place of no return.
come lontano is a perverse historical romance in which two lives are exposed, inter-mixed, doused with sentiment, and — hopefully — redeemed. The work revolves around a central ‘couple’ — Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas. There is a third main character, an ambiguous villain made of steel, glass and rubber. Each member of our central couple has her/his own external distractions which impinge — to varying degrees — on their brief, ecstatic encounter. This encounter was in fact a cinematic collaboration; it’s product the film Medea (1969).
A search for a non-existent image, a desire to create an image where there is none,“ leads to Rea Tajiri’s composition on recorded history and non-recorded memory. Framed by the haunting facts of the post-Pearl Harbor Japanese internment camps (which dislocated 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II), Tajiri creates a version of her family’s story through interviews and historical detail, remembering a time that many people would rather forget.
In the fall of 1986, Richard Fung made his first visit to his father’s birthplace, a village in southern Guangdong, China. This experimental documentary examines the way children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents, and focuses on the ongoing subjective construction of history and memory. The Way to My Father's Village juxtaposes the son’s search for his own historical roots, and his father’s avoidance of his cultural heritage.
This archival film remixes the systemic violence and power throughout the 1984 National Day Parade, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, and the 2014 Umbrella Movement.
An ode to the memories of El Aliso, the sycamore tree that once stood at the center of Yaangna, the Indigenous Gabrieleno village that Los Angeles grew out from. All elements sourced in the film are from the original site and the nearby Los Angeles River.
"On January 22, 1987 an unjustly convicted Budd Dwyer grasped onto the pages of his final speech as Pennsylvania's State Treasurer before shooting himself in front of news cameras. Our current year of armageddon, recession, and occupation resonates as a fitting time to step into Budd's shoes (and perhaps others who sought freedom the same way.) I set up a mini news conference with antiquated, glitchy analog cameras, mixers, players, and decks with the goal of recording Budd's speech in one take.
Shot over one day, this program records the events and protests in Washington DC on May Day, 1971. This was the day when one of the most disruptive actions of the Vietnam War era occurred in Washington, DC, when thousands of anti-war activists tried to shut down the Federal government in protest at the War.
A feel for the mood in the city is gained during the first half of the video with shots of the city from a moving car in traffic. Protestors, city residents, and police are captured on tape, along with exciting and moving shots of the day's actions and arrests.
Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.
Produced by The Sharjah Biennial Production Programme.
In the case of Carlos Motta’s career, the impetus has always been on, not adhering to particular medium or a particular style, but rather using media as it becomes appropriate tell a story that has heretofore been stifled by dominant power structures. The technical variability of his work is only matched by its potential to generate conversation and discourse in the arenas of sexuality, gender, democracy and colonialism – usually as a conflux of all four through historical excavation.
In Dreams and Autumn 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.
This is the last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, and the text Hello Trouble as well as a series of etched photographs.
No Damage is a composition made out of fragments from over 80 different feature and documentary films that show the architecture of New York City — its architectural presence as captured on film over eight decades. Lifted out of their original context and juxtaposed in groups, these scenes reveal their emotional implications: grandeur, glamour, the wake of modernism, post-modernism and, most recently, post 9/11 sentimentalism. A number of particular clips that resonate such emotions enter into a non-verbal discourse on age, status, functionality and aesthetics.
El Zócalo is an observational portrait of Mexico City’s central Plaza de la Constitutión during one day in August. Soldiers, Aztec dancers, clowns, food vendors, protestors, rain, dogs, tourists, kites, balloons, and dignitaries all meet in the public space of the Zócalo. This documentary presents daily life in one of the largest and most vibrant urban centers in the world, but it begins with a dream of history and ends with a dream of the space full of people for a Zapatista rally.
Lars Movin presents a video portrait of artists who have radically disrupted our conception of art since the 1960s. A large part of the video was made in Venice in 1990, when many of the original Fluxus artists met to hold a large exhibition in connection with the Biennale. The tape includes interviews with most of the leading Fluxus artists, documentation of their works, and clips from videos and films made during the 30 years of this ungovernable art form.
Inspired by an unaccomplished personal project, in this animation, I’m exploring ideas of intention, extension, and failed romanticism. I used images and texts from mass-produced postcards, packaging, calendar booklets, books, posters, and pamphlets that were created and used as political propaganda devices for the invasion of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy during WWII. Some of these prints were on the front covers of school notebooks, some were games that taught the geography, history, and natural resources of Ethiopia.
Over The Horizon is a moving image installation that takes its name from the failed radar system developed on Orford Ness in Suffolk during the Cold War. The building that housed it and its aerial field are now used to broadcast the BBC World Service to Europe. Over The Horizon revisits the site where my earlier film Cobra Mist was made and explores through photography and sound the memory of a place, the remnants of history and evidence of stories true or rumoured.
Blood and Guts in High School features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations* that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker's book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes' interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by U.S. news events from the time period in which the book was written.
When everyone has forgotten the romantic refrains of the Internationale sung in different languages, Pablito, a blue front Amazon parrot, capable of living to 100 years old, will remember. He rings bells and is learning to whistle, hum and sing the Internationale in French, Spanish and German.
Produced in former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia & Montenegro, Slovenia), Austria, USA, Canada, 1999-2003.
A meditation on the elusiveness of Jewish history set against the backdrop of contemporary Poland.
Lee Choon-Sop was a Korean theology student imprisoned for protesting the death of a fellow theology student. A Dedication to Lee Choon-Sop was created for an Amnesty International fund-raiser to aid a group of prisoners of conscience detained in repressive countries. The video features a series of photographic images projected onto various materials, including cloth and sheet rock, that are manipulated to suggest the torture to which Lee was subjected by the Korean government. A photographic slide image of a man's nude back, proj
still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Though it constructs a documentary record of blight and decay, still/here is a refusal of closure that dwells within the space of rupture and confronts the presence of a profound absence.
–– Christopher Harris
Camera, sound, edit: Christopher Harris
Additional camera: Joel Wanek
Staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Conakry is a sequence shot on 16mm film that travels through time, space and media to revisit one film reel from the Guinean archive. This particular reel documents an exhibition curated by Amílcar Cabral at the Palais du Peuple in 1972 in Conakry, Guinea, reporting on the state of the war against Portuguese rule. César invited the Portuguese writer Grada Kilomba and the American radio activist Diana McCarty to reflect on these images and their history.
A series of numbers that form infamous years that are uttered in a repetitive pedagogical litany. Ominous dates as a correlate of forgotten apolitical portraits. Portraits of a remembered royalty whose wealth was made possible by infamous times. Political faces accompanied by their corresponding dates. Peaceful figures whose placid portrait rests on the automated civilizational barbarism. This is part of the educational film cycle.
