History

I sit at my computer cutting up real time footage of waterfalls, snow storms, boiling water. I combine these to make threads of moving images. I look and listen to the result in front of me and I think of people whose actions transcend fear—not in a momentary instinctual way—but over a sustained period of time. The name Florence Nightingale comes to mind, a woman whose name has become a cliche but of whom I know so little. I order books of her writings from Amazon and select phrases spread over hundreds of pages to make a soliloquy or poem. We collaborate.

Putting the Balls Away is a reenactment of the historic September 21, 1973, tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, created for broadcast on the 35th anniversary of the original event. The Battle of the Sexes was the most-watched live sporting event at that time, and pitted chauvinist against feminist, when women tennis players demanded equal pay to that of their male counterparts. Both players are performed by Mateik, whose work wages strategic operations to overthrow institutions of compulsory gender. After each game the competitors "switch sides".

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.

This is the audiovisual translation of the Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History.

Memo Mori is a journey through Hackney tracing loss and disappearance. A canoe trip along the canal, the huts of the Manor Garden allotments in Hackney Wick, demolition, relocation, a magical bus tour through the Olympic park and a Hell’s Angel funeral mark a seismic shift in the topography of East London.

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. 

Anthony Ramos' astute deconstruction of television news focuses on his part in the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. Ramos, who had served an 18-month prison sentence for draft evasion, was interviewed by news reporter Gabe Pressman, whose film crew meets Ramos' video crew in a confrontation between technologies and sensibilities. At the time, some broadcast television news crews still used 16mm film, although the expensive transition to ENG (electronic news gathering) systems had begun in 1974.

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

This video, shot in March 1970, contains raw footage from a Women’s Liberation event and discussion that took place in an art space. The tape begins with shots of the crowd mingling while music and speeches are heard in the background. Speakers address the audience, and the tape continues to record the discussion that follows. The main topics are abortion and contraception, and how they relate to power dynamics and the struggle for Women’s Liberation in general.

The Embassy deals with the codes of representation used by the former Portuguese colonial power over the West African country Guinea-Bissau, and with modes of memory production. It shows a photo album depicting the perspective of the Portuguese colonist, who photographed with documentary diligence landscapes, people, architecture and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the 1940s and 1950s.

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.

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.

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. 

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.