A brief dialogue between Marianne Renoir and Pierrot and a short description-reading from ‘Pierrot le fou’ about Diego Velázquez – these intersect with a visual moment to constitute the outline of a perception and the occurrence of the idea of ‘el pueblo,’ of a meeting.
Fifty years after the Cultural Revolution in China, two elderly Chinese women recite the propaganda songs they learn at the educational camps.
Vice President Mike Pence eagerly plays cheerleader in chief for Donald Trump. In accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 2016, Pence proclaimed, “I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican — in that order,” suggesting how we might understand his role. This ground-breaking, earth-shaking video begins with a pomp-ridden televised press conference, accompanied by uplifting music. Held early in 2017 at the White House Rose Garden, it showcased the president’s announced withdrawal from the historic Paris Climate Accord.
Covid Messages is a video in six parts, based around broadcasts of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 press conferences. The work focusses on the British government’s attempts to eliminate the virus through the use of magic spells and rituals. While the pandemic spreads and the death toll rises, the Prime Minister makes repeated errors of judgement. Exasperated by his many mistakes, the spirits of the dead rise up and intervene.
In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sang the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. Oh My Homeland is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration.
This Is A Studio uses surveillance footage that captures a late-night police visit. This document raises questions about home, belonging, and systems of power.
As recent state cut-backs force many mental patients out into the real world, Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons team up to address psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. After years of being cared for, Tony, Joe and their dog Woody leave the cuckoo’s nest and reluctantly face the prospect of finding jobs and cooking their own meals. Their darkly comic adventures include a comatose Tony tuning in to daytime TV, and Joe fantasizing about death while strolling in the park.
In conversation with David Getsy — an art historian focusing on queer and transgender methodologies in sculpture theory and performance history — Cassils discusses their monumental performance artworks and inspirations.
A political composition on natural resistance. These images are an expiring breath in danger of extinction. These images become extinguished, consumed: a drop, a pure intensity which only appears when falling. In the presence of the image these audiovisual crowds become an affected body, assaulted by entropy. A face exhausted and reanimated by the continuous sound trance that traverses the battlefield. Faces for an eye that would not need to see.
Through dancing, The Motherfucker's Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance. Bush also dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region.
As recent state cut-backs force many mental patients out into the real world, Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons team up to address psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. After years of being cared for, Tony, Joe and their dog Woody leave the cuckoo’s nest and reluctantly face the prospect of finding jobs and cooking their own meals. Their darkly comic adventures include a comatose Tony tuning in to daytime TV, and Joe fantasizing about death while strolling in the park.
Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist's practice of scaling oral history, utilizing the vertical 16:9 aspect ratio as a vernacular form. Never Rest/Unrest takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa's "Imperfect Cinema" on the potential for filmmaking that aims towards an urgent, process-driven cinema. Dominant narratives of crisis pushed by news journalism are resisted.
This surprisingly candid tape between two men looking to avoid the draft and a draft counselor offers unique entry into conversations that often only took place behind closed doors during the Vietnam War. The Videofreex capture the length of a discussion, set in an office room piled high with stacks of records and forms, during which a counselor guides two college-age men through a series of questions that they must manage and address in order to carefully navigate the legal system.
Biting Nations, a video produced in collaboration with Luna Montenegro, Lisa Bradley, Arantxa Johnson questions the assumption of fixed national identities and investigates one’s multiple notions of geographical belonging. In the performance the bitting of the fake nails with painted flags from the countries where the artists are culturally or personally related to create a disturbing feeling in the spectator. It looks at how diasporic identities can be defined across various nations and in between distant cultures.
1968 was the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, ten days after the massacre of students and civilians by military and police on October 2 in the "Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco."
An elegy to the popular demands against ominous social and political events in the recent Mexico.
As a verite documentation of the May 1, 1971 demonstration against the Vietnam War staged in Washington, D.C., Mayday Realtime presents a largely unedited flow of events from the point of view of participants on the street. Cort's camera captures the random, disorienting incidents that marked the day - demonstrators holding up traffic in the Capitol, skirmishes with police, on-the-scene interviews with onlookers. The camera impulsively responds to shouting and movement on the street.
The film suggests a link between three political figures from the history of Mexican resistance: the Soldadera (woman guerrilla fighter), the Zapatista (member of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation), and the Normalista (students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School).
Natural Life is a feature-length experimental documentary challenging inequities in the U.S. juvenile justice system by depicting, through documentation and reenactment, the stories of five individuals who were sentenced to Life Without Parole (Natural Life) for crimes they committed as youth.
The youthful status and/or lesser culpability of these youths, their backgrounds, and their potential for rehabilitation were not taken into account at any point in the charging and sentencing process. The five will never be evaluated for change, difference or growth. They will remain in prison till they die.
As a verite documentation of the May 1, 1971 demonstration against the Vietnam War staged in Washington, D.C., Mayday Realtime presents a largely unedited flow of events from the point of view of participants on the street. Cort's camera captures the random, disorienting incidents that marked the day - demonstrators holding up traffic in the Capitol, skirmishes with police, on-the-scene interviews with onlookers. The camera impulsively responds to shouting and movement on the street.
Radio reports analyze staged photographs we do not see, showing the victims of a mass murder committed by Mexican soldiers. The politicization of the film accounts for the duality between framing and mis-framing, and also shows the overflowing character of a process of transit.
Tarlabaşı integrates performances of everyday movements and gestures as a direct response to the devastation caused by the centralized state sponsored urban renewal project in downtown Istanbul.
Dancer: Idil Kemer
Music: Cenk Ergün
Production: Yunus Demir
An old Russian Akula submarine, armed with ballistic nuclear missiles, is assigned a new captain. But Captain Pavel seems to care very little for Navy protocol. In fact, he feels the crew’s jobs are a waste of time, preferring to lead discussions about spiritual matters. The Captain dresses in a cassock and grows a long beard. His favorite pastime is shamanic drumming, which even the confused American’s can hear from the ship.
