For the final installment of our SAIC student writing series, Natalia De Orellana examines the boundaries between documentary and fiction in Mati Diop’s A Thousand Suns. She suggests that Diop creates a world where imagination and reality intermingle. Even as tougher immigration laws are proposed by European leaders–jeopardizing the long-gone fantasy of free movement–immigration has remained one of the principal […]
Thursday, November 13th | Mati Diop in person! Known for dreamlike shorts that experiment with the boundaries between documentary and fiction, award-winning French filmmaker Mati Diop mined her own history for A Thousand Suns. The film explores the public and private legacies of the seminal Senegalese film Touki Bouki (1972), directed by her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty. She focuses […]
Andrew Lampert sits down with SAIC graduate student Elizabeth Metcalfe to talk about his interest in archiving, current inspirations, and his unique approach to improvisation. Lampert joined CATE on October 9th 2014 and turned his attention to the Gene Siskel Film Center in a site-specific performance created especially for the evening. The performance was accompanied […]
I first encountered the work of David Wojnarowicz a few years ago whilst interning for the New York City based arts organization Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). I had been asked to research his expansive practice for an upcoming panel discussion David Wojnarowicz: Motion Rhythms and was instructed that I would need to visit Fales Library […]
Thursday, November 6th | Introduced by Marvin J. Taylor, Director of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University and founder of the Downtown collection The Culture Wars and devastation of the AIDS epidemic contributed to a cultural scene in 1980s New York that crackled with tension and ached with sadness. Against this background, artists Tom Rubnitz, […]
SAIC printmedia graduate student Amanda Sukenic takes the time to describe Anda Korsts as a feminist visionary who, along with many others, shaped the alternative media landscape of the USA on both a local and national level. Please join us this Thursday October 30th for a special survey of Korsts’s prolific career presented in collaboration […]
Thursday, October 30th | Followed by a roundtable with documentary filmmaker Judy Hoffman, Media Burn Archive Founder Tom Weinberg, and Executive Director Sara Chapman In the 1970s, Chicago journalist and artist Anda Korsts helped pioneer video as a radical tool for art and activism. A key figure in the guerrilla television movement, she worked on a series […]
SAIC Art History student Ke Wang speaks to Cao Fei’s unique depiction of China—a country undergoing significant cultural change. Cao Fei’s new film Haze and Fog screens at Conversations at the Edge tomorrow, October 23rd, at 6pm. Cao Fei’s works are based on the social environment of three major cities in Guangdong, China, known as Zhu Sanjiao, […]
Thursday, October 23rd | Cao Fei in person! Chinese artist Cao Fei mixes fantasy, documentary, and virtual reality to reflect on the ways China’s rapidly changing economy has transformed the everyday lives and imaginations of its citizens. Her latest film, Haze and Fog (2013) is a darkly humorous reinterpretation of the zombie film set in Beijing. Here the undead […]
It seems apt this week that Chicago is experiencing such a torrent of rather British-like weather, as we prepare to welcome the legendary John Smith to Conversations at the Edge (CATE). This week is a very special event due to the fact Smith was the first artist to present at CATE in 2001. We are […]