Join celebrated director Apichatpong Weerasethakul for a screening of his award-winning MEMORIA.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria, 2021, Courtesy of the artist and NEON

“MEMORIA  is one of the greatest movies you’ll see—or hear—in a theater this year.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“An emotionally wrenching and intellectually fulfilling experience.” – A.O. Scott, New York Times

Mysterious and transfixing, MEMORIA stars Tilda Swinton as an expat scientist living in Colombia who is suddenly beset by sounds only she can hear. In her quest to find the source of these sonic disturbances, she travels through lush countrysides, busy Bogotá streets, and austere brutalist architecture, chasing ghosts, missing persons, and the reverberating echoes of the past. The film, which is only available  to experience in theaters, will be followed by an extended conversation with Weerasethakul, who will discuss the ideas and experiences that drive his practice.

Presented in partnership with Northwestern University’s Department of Radio/TV/Film and The Block Museum. 

Colombia, 136 minutes plus discussion
Format: 35mm
In Spanish and English with English subtitles

Thursday, April 20, 6:00 p.m.

Join Berlin and Beirut-based artist Marwa Arsanios for her remarkable multi-part project on collectivity, feminism, environmentalism, and resistance, WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY.

Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideology Part 4: Reverse Shot, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and mor charpentier.

“A meditation on the relationship of human beings to the natural world, and a reckoning with the authoritative posture of conventional documentary filmmaking. – David Markus, Frieze

Since 2017, Beirut and Berlin-based artist Marwa Arsanios has been working on a series of remarkable films collectively titled WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY that explore ecology, feminism, collectivity, and resistance through Indigenous and women’s communities in Kurdistan, Colombia, and Lebanon. She presents the project over two evenings, each followed by a conversation about her subjects and innovative approach.

In WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY PART 3: MICRO RESISTENCIAS, Arsanios turns her focus to the seed and its potential as a tool for political agency and resistance. She travels to central Colombia, where she spends time with a group of Indigenous women farmers devoted to safeguarding native seeds and agriculture. As these women buttress their communities against transnational agricultural conglomerates threatening the land, Arsanios draws parallels to the political violence indigenous communities have faced at the hands of paramilitary forces since the 1980s.

Arsanios returns to the Middle East in WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY PART 4: REVERSE SHOT which begins with the entreaty: “imagine a land without ownership.” Tracing her own efforts to transform a piece of privately-owned land in Northern Lebanon into a masha’a—a  land for the commons—she brings together archival research, legal theory, and oral histories to chart a history and future of the region from the perspective of the land itself.

2020–22, Colombia, Lebanon, 66 minutes plus discussion
Format: digital video
In Spanish, Arabic and French with English subtitles

Wednesday, April 19, 6:00 p.m.

Join Berlin and Beirut-based artist Marwa Arsanios for her award-winning multi-part project on collectivity, feminism, environmentalism, and resistance, WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY.

Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideology Part 1, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and mor charpentier

“A meditation on the relationship of human beings to the natural world, and a reckoning with the authoritative posture of conventional documentary filmmaking. – David Markus, Frieze

Since 2017, Beirut and Berlin-based artist Marwa Arsanios has been working on a series of remarkable films collectively titled WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY that explore ecology, feminism, collectivity, and resistance through Indigenous and women’s communities in Kurdistan, Colombia, and Lebanon. She presents the project over two evenings, each followed by a conversation about her subjects and innovative approach.

Winner of the prestigious Georges de Beauregard prize at FIDMarseille, WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY PART 1 and PART 2 examines structures of self-governance and environmentalism fostered by the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement. Arsanios asks: How can the land provide refuge from oppression? She meets with groups of female guerrilla soldiers in the snow-dusted mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, interviews a woman who teaches others how to forage for edible weeds and medicinal plants, and travels to a small farming village in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Syria called Jinwar, or “place of women,” where women have reimagined life without men.

2017-19, Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, North and East Syria, 51 minutes plus discussion
Format: digital video
In Arabic and Kurdish with English subtitles

Thursday, March 30, 6:00 and 8:30 p.m.

Join acclaimed filmmaker Deborah Stratman for the Chicago premiere of her latest film LAST THINGS. Presented in partnership with the 33rd Onion City Experimental Film Festival.

Deborah Stratman, Last Things 2023, Courtesy of the artist

“Fuses the heart of a poet with the mind of a scientist.” – Chris Stults, ArtForum

Award-winning filmmaker and School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum Deborah Stratman’s (BFA 1990) latest film is a profound exploration of the past and future of Earth through one of its most elemental materials—rocks. Meditating on our planet’s dramatic physical and biochemical evolution, Stratman weaves together sci-fi and sci-fact to imagine a time where life endures but humans have disappeared. Featuring a breathtaking array of sources, including J.-H  Rosny’s turn-of-the-century speculative fictions about rock-like organisms, interviews with renowned geologist and environmental activist Marcia Bjørnerud, revelatory micro photography, and earthly observation, LAST THINGS asks us to ponder our place in this cosmic history and among the innumerable life forms our planet has produced. Stratman will introduce the 6:00 p.m. screening. Afterward, she will be  joined by her research collaborator, the writer Sukhdev Sandhu, to discuss the ideas and questions that informed the project.

Presented in partnership with the 33rd Onion City Experimental Film Festival as the festival’s official opening night screening. The Onion City Experimental Film Festival is a production of Chicago Filmmakers. The festival runs from March 30 to April 5. 

2023, USA, 50 minutes plus discussion
Format: 16mm on digital
In French and English with English subtitles

Thursday, February 16, 6:00 p.m.

“The films and videos of Los Ingrávidos are signed in solidarity under a collective banner… fashioned together in love and outrage.” – Stephen Broomer, CinemaScope

“In its mode of organization, intersectional approach, and formal characteristics, [Los Ingrávidos] is one of the most singular contemporary Latin American film collectives.” – Raquel Schefer, Jump Cut

Since 2012, the Mexican Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, which translates into English as “the weightless,” has been producing dazzling, often trance-like films with an activist sensibility. In their first ever appearance in Chicago, the collective presents a selection of recent shorts, including two parts of their searing THE SUN QUARTET (2017) and the mesmerizing TIERRA EN TRANCE (2022). Stitched together from contemporary, historical, and mythic images of Mesoamerica, the films reflect on interconnected social, political, and environmental issues in Mexico, the Americas, and beyond.

Presented in partnership with the Video Data Bank and Northwestern University’s Block Museum.

2017–22, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Mexico, ca 75 minutes plus discussion
Format: 16mm and 16mm on digital
In Spanish with English subtitles

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ABOUT 

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos was founded in Tehuacán Mexico in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analogue mediums, interventions on archival materials, agitprop, mythology, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations in documentary and cinematography produce visual and auditory  impressions that are political possibilities in their own right. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the Bienal de la Imagen Movimiento in Buenos Aires, International Film Festival Rotterdam, RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival, Images Festival; Media City Film Festival, Ambulante Cine Documental, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Festival Internacional de Cine FILMADRID.

Thursday, February 09, 6:00 p.m.

Join artists Jamie Fenton, Copper Giloth, and Jane Veeder for an evening of groundbreaking video and computer art from Chicago.

Barbara Sykes, A Movement Within, 1976. Courtesy of the artist and Media Burn Archive.

“When I think of computer art I think of Chicago.” – Gene Youngblood, Send Magazine, 1983

In the 1970s and 80s, Chicago was home to a community of video artists and engineers—many of them women—whose groundbreaking experiments with analogue and digital computers produced a body of astonishingly rich and influential work. This program brings together videos by four of these innovators, including Jamie Fenton, Copper Giloth, Barbara Sykes (MFA 1981), and Jane Veeder (MFA 1977). Introduced and moderated by scholar Helena Shaskevich, the program will be followed by a conversation with Fenton, Giloth, and Veeder, who will discuss the ideas, technologies, and community that influenced their works.

Presented in partnership with Media Burn Archive and Video Data Bank. Electric Visions is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that aims to expand understandings of Chicago’s creative communities, past and present. Funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

1975-85, multiple artists, United States, ca 60 minutes plus discussion
Format: Various formats on digital video and live demonstration
In English

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jamie Fenton is an artist, game designer, and engineer whose 1978 DIGITAL TV DINNER (with Raul Zaritsky and Dick Ainsworth) is thought to be one of the earliest examples of contemporary glitch art. She was part of the team that designed and developed  the pivotal Bally Astrocade home computer and game system in the mid-1970s. In 1978, she created one of the earliest graphics programming languages, BASIC Zgrass, with Tom DeFanti and Nola Donato. Fenton also designed the 1981 science fiction arcade game GORF during her time as artist and programmer for Chicago-based Midway Manufacturing. In 1985, she developed the software that would become MacroMind Director (later Macromedia Director, and then Adobe Director). She has continued to produce new media and glitch art while working with some of the most influential tech companies today, including Apple, Amazon, and TiVO, among others.

Copper Giloth is an award-winning digital media artist whose work has been featured in  international festivals, galleries, and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Sciences, and ACM SIGGRAPH. In 1980, Giloth became the first master of fine arts candidate and woman to graduate from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1982, Giloth chaired the first ACM SIGGRAPH juried public exhibition of experimental two-dimensional, three-dimensional interactive, and time-based works by artists and scientists. In 1985, Giloth and Jane Veeder co-authored ”The Paint Problem,” an influential essay on issues around the future of artists’ digital tools. Giloth is professor emeritus of art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also served as director of academic computing in the Office of Information Technologies for 21 years.

Barbara Sykes is a pioneering Chicago video artist whose individual and collaborative works have been shown extensively worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, among others. Her work is emblematic of the cross-pollination between analogue and digital computing fostered by Chicago’s video art community. Sykes studied with the artist and engineer Dan Sandin at the University of Illinois at Chicago and performed with Tom deFanti at the legendary EVE 1 and EVE 2 Electronic Visualization Events in 1975 and 1976, which featured some of the first ever real-time computer performances. She received a master of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and served as professor of Television at Columbia College from 1982-2005.

Jane Veeder is a video and digital media artist whose works have been shown internationally and are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She began working with electronic media in 1976, collaborating with the artist Phil Morton on a series of videos while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Veeder worked for Real Time Design, an early Chicago digital start up, and experimented with video game systems and personal computers in the creation of her artworks, using both the Bally Arcade System and the Datamax UV-1. For most of her career, she produced her own animated and interactive computer works while designing graphical interfaces for software applications and interactive entertainment. She served as professor of Design and Industry at San Francisco State University from 1988-2017.

Helena Shaskevich is a doctor of philosophy candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University ofNew York, where she is writing a dissertation on 1970s feminist video art and political activism. She is currently a fellow at the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab. Her writing has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Art Journal, and Camera Obscura.

Tiffany Sia, Do Not Circulate, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Over the last five years, Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist and writer Tiffany Sia has produced a series of urgent works that examine the making, circulation, and collection of images in times of upheaval and crisis. Centered on her place of birth, its ongoing political movement, and the ever-present residue of its colonial history, the implications of Sia’s projects reverberate globally. In collage-like essays culled from online videos, news media, state archives, and material shot with her own mobile device, Sia highlights connections between state power, big tech, and corporate media while offering a radical and emancipatory vision for a media built on lived experience, shared memory, and the subversion of official channels of information. Sia will present three film/videos, NEVER REST/UNREST (2020), DO NOT CIRCULATE (2021), and WHAT RULES THE INVISIBLE (2022), and discuss them in relation to her recent writings and connected artworks.

Tiffany Sia, 2020-2022, Hong Kong/ USA, ca 60 minutes plus audience discussion
Digital video
In Cantonese, Mandarin, and English

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ABOUT

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer born in Hong Kong. Sia’s films have been screened at the New York City International Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art Doc Fortnight, The Flaherty Film Seminar, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and Prismatic Ground, among others. She is the author of 咸濕 Salty Wet, a chapbook published by Inpatient Press in 2019, and the artist book sequel, Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, published through Speculative Place Press in 2020. Her writing has been published in Film Quarterly, October, and elsewhere. Sia’s artworks have been exhibited at Artists Space (New York), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf), and elsewhere. She received the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award in 2021. In addition to her artistic practice, Sia is the founder of the experimental project space Speculative Place and a film producer, serving as the executive producer for Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s EMPTY METAL (2018), and executive producer of Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s forthcoming documentary AANIKOOBIJIGAN [ANCESTOR / GREAT-GRANDPARENT / GREAT-GRANDCHILD].

Join Bruce Jenkins, SAIC professor and co-author of The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963-1965, and Greg Pierce, director of Film and Video at The Andy Warhol Museum, for this rare screening of Warhol’s revelatory BATMAN DRACULA project. Presented in conjunction with the SAIC Faculty Sabbatical Triennial exhibition, on view at SAIC Galleries.

Andy Warhol, Batman Dracula, 1964, unfinished. Courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol was an extraordinarily prolific filmmaker, making hundreds of screen tests and dozens of feature-length films in the mid-to-late 1960s. With recent restoration projects and the publication of The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963-1965, the full scope of his cinematic project is just now coming to light. Among the revelations is the unfinished–and virtually unseen–BATMAN DRACULA, an ambitious feature project Warhol shot with legendary performer Jack Smith in 1964. Loosely assembled onto two reels, the film is a fascinating departure from his other projects of the time, involving multiple shooting locations, elaborate sets and costumes, a narrative with intertwining plotlines, and a title character that veers from Gothic demon to free-spirited vagabond. For this special presentation, SAIC Professor Bruce Jenkins, co-author of the Catalogue Raisonné, and Greg Pierce, director of Film and Video at The Andy Warhol Museum, present an extended excerpt from the project, along with stills and period anecdotes, contextualizing it both within Warhol’s overall body of work and recent preservation efforts.

Andy Warhol, 1964, USA, ca 60 minutes plus discussion
16mm film on digital
In English