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.
The Source is a Hole poses a web of loose connections and liminal associations to sculpt a treatise on transexual mourning. As a series of love letters, stories recount the authors own inception at the 1982 world’s fair, his attempt to remove a lodged tampon, his cravings for bottomless eros, and a barrage of tangential encounters, spanning the everyday, to performance reenactment, to science fiction cinema analysis and drag.
Ground Effect is an investigation of the constantly shifting, 80km long line in Israel, where rainfall amounts to less than 200mm a year on average. This line, which aligns with the global desert belt, cuts from the east, near the West Bank, to the west, near the Gaza strip. It is where I grew up, an area divided between industrial scale agriculture, nature preserves, ancient and recent ruins, Bedouin towns, encampments and olive groves, artificial pine forests planted on contested lands, rural Jewish communities, and military practice zones.
On April 30, 2019, Eiko and Alexis Moh, one of Eiko's collaborators in The Duet Project, visited the Manzanar Historical Site. Manzanar was one of ten American internment camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the World War II. At the peak (in September 1942), 10,046 Japanese Americans were forced to live in Manzanar.
This video was shot two days after Manzanar Pilgrimage commemorated its 50th anniversary on site.
An experimental investigation into the use of race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing upon language, personal memories and the 1959 text, Black Like Me, it deals with Lacan’s “mirror state” theories of beauty and the movement from object to subject.
Made using voicemails the Kuchar brothers left on her home answering machine, the artist reveals George and Mike in all their candid honesty leading up to and following George’s untimely death in 2011. McGuire floats their voices along a river of digital scribbles and her own voice in singer/songwriter mode. The beauty of the piece lies partly in how the voicemails, used as-is and chronologically, contain an entire narrative about love and loss in a DIY style reminiscent of the Kuchars.
Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness contrasts the fragmented past of the filmmaker growing up in Baghdad with his surreal California present. Through poetic writing and jarring visuals, the film creates a calm and cruel sense of memory and landscape.
Weaving Stories While Walking, a reading-performance film by Sónia Vaz Borges and Mónica de Miranda, interweaves multiple accounts from members of the resistance against the colonial powers in Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Angola, and Portugal. It looks at the centrality of individual and collective walking, movement, and affective experiences in understanding the liberation struggles and their legacy in the contemporary times. Weaving Stories While Walking intermingles timely narratives for the current social contexts.
In this irreverent and hilarious videotape, renowned street performer Stoney Burke leads us on a subversive tour of the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston’s Astrodome. Burke disregards the traditional terms of “political debate” offered by the network news establishment, and zeroes in on the questions that never get asked, confronting such Republican luminaries as Oliver North, Neil Bush, Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp, Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, and Rush Limbaugh (among others), on issues that are glossed over during the convention.
3 Peonies is a brief, poetic 16mm film of a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. The reverence for beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field painting of high modernism that, in many cases, eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty.
Grieving the recent death of his father, filmmaker Cam Archer distracts himself with the regular photographing of a particular young man.
“The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density. Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined.”
— Kengo Kuma
...a meditation on a familiar New York city space in which memories, fantasies and the maniacal intertwine.
With David Warrilow and Nancy Campbell.
–– Ken Kobland
"Despite the didactic promise of its title, Carl Elsaesser’s new film will not teach you how to complete this obscure action. The phrase itself, at once ridiculous and noble, is pleasure enough, and its tone fits perfectly on a work that walks a thin, dandyish path down the border of farce and elegy. Another pleasure: it isn’t about anything, though it’s of quite a lot. Of fathers (who might teach one how to run a trotline, or sit on a porch, or disappear); of other films (particularly a pair by adopted fathers Michael Snow and William E.
Morayngava: the “design of things.” Yngiru: the box of the spirits, the films, just like xaman dreams. This is how the Asurini define video, which has just arrived in their village. After discovering that it is possible to store their images, the old men lament that they never stored images of their ancestors and decided to register the initiation of a xaman, a tradition threatened by new times.
Directed by Virginia Valadão and Regina Müller.
In Assurini with English subtitles.
"This is the first of a set of pieces that involve combining a series of electronic video process recordings, musics, texts and appropriated materials. These multiple elements, simple and tricky grammars, trigger expanding electronic narratives. The trajectories and drags of multiple narratives color the electronics and visa a versa.
What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upends archival travelog footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows tropes and patterns. The same shots repeat across decades, from landscape to cityscape to street scenes. Sometimes the footage reveals more about the traveler himself, such as a sequence where the camera curiously tracks the hips and bare legs of women wearing cheongsam crossing a busy intersection.
Nine individuals visit the Santa Monica Mall and share their thoughts and feelings about love with Wendy Clarke and her camera. Love Tapes: Santa Monica Mall is part of Clarke's ongoing project, Love Tapes.
Endless Dreams and Water Between is a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is woven with the physical locations they inhabit, visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. The characters’ reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space.
A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a re-cataloguer, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images that he puts before us – his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse.
Frances, a young Gay Indian (2 Spirit), played by Lacey Hill, is struggling with the aftermath of a gay basing. Through her friendship with her ex Jean, she gathers the strength to go out in public again. This video is a salute to the 70s and to Gay Indian movements which became 2Spirit/Indigiqueer communities.
Song performed by Lacy Hill.
Fluid Frontiers is the fifth and final film in the series entitled The Diaspora Suite, exploring Asili’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press, and artworks of local Detroit Artists.
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.
This surreal, free-form autobiography is concerned with childhood and adult rituals, and the longing for meaning and connection during the often wildly absurd events of early life. Obsessive Becoming returns to Reeves’s early exploration of personal narrative forms, poetry, and his interest in creating a more spontaneous and direct fusion between language and video. Words and images of the expectations and disappointments of coming of age break down the boundaries of both mediums.
The crowded streets of New York City turn into fictive, cinematographic scenery. Provost is playing with our collective memory, its cinematic codes and narrative languages - questioning the boundaries between a staged, suggested reality and authentic fiction. Although filmed with a hidden camera, Plot Point presents a highly dramatic construction with overly sophisticated images and a subtle but tangible urge in the soundtrack.
