We are excited to present Translations & Transmutations, in conjunction with Video Data Bank, featuring the work of artist Sky Hopinka. Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians, creates sublime polyrhythmic films that draw upon his history and identity, addressing ideas of homeland, language, and landscape. […]
A Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Sky Hopinka creates sublime polyrhythmic works that draw upon his history and identity. He presents a selection of recent works built around ideas of homeland, language, and landscape. In the dazzling Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2016), audio of one […]
Read More… from March 16 – Sky Hopinka: Translations and Transmutations
This week, we look forward to screening The Passion of Remembrance, the first feature film from The Sankofa Film and Video Collective, co-directed by members Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien. For additional insight and context into this film and the impact of the collective’s work, we are linking to YOUNG BRITISH AND BLACK: A MONOGRAPH ON THE WORK […]
The Sankofa Film and Video Collective was part of a wave of politically-minded Black independent filmmakers who emerged in London in the 1980s, during an era of increasing social conservatism and racial unrest. The group’s acclaimed first feature, co-directed by members Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, is a prismatic look at gender, race, sexuality, and […]
This week, we are excited to welcome back graduate student Julia Sharpe to write for us! Sharpe’s essay looks at Stacey Steers’ surreal films, which explore the inner-lives of women, meditating on fraught relationships, motherhood, medicine, and death. Whispering, dropping, digging, buzzing… A page peels back and a rose rapidly blooms and decays; the forest […]
Bees swarm, a bat swallows a young woman, and eggs and orbs multiply against backdrops of flora, viscera, and pulsating night skies. Such are the surreal visions of Stacey Steers’ animated films, which she composes by hand from thousands of silent film stills and fragments of 19th-century engravings and illustrations. Over the last decade, she […]
We are thrilled to welcome graduate student George Olken to write for us this week. In his essay, Olken reflects on the work of Nathaniel Dorsky, whose films explore the relationship between cinema and the unknowable. Nathaniel Dorsky captures silent images of the world, subtle shifts, beauty. His tools are deceptively simple: a 16mm camera […]
Since the early 1960s, Nathaniel Dorsky has been making extraordinarily beautiful films that blend a reverence for the sensual world with a deep contemplation of the mysteries beyond. They are “occasions for reflection and meditation on light, landscape, time, and the motions of consciousness,” writes curator Steve Polta. Dorsky’s “photography emphasizes the elemental frisson between […]
We are excited to present Against Ethnography, a program of contemporary videos from Latin America which charts the limits of communication between indigenous and non-indigenous worlds. Curated by film scholar Federico Windhausen, this program was originally put together as part of a larger series for the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival titled El Pueblo: Searching for Contemporary Latin America. To […]
Curated by Federico Windhausen, this revealing program of contemporary videos from Latin America charts the limits of communication between indigenous and nonindigenous worlds. Vincent Carelli and Dominique Gallois’ Meeting Ancestors / A arca dos Zo’é (Brazil, 1993) follows an Amazonian tribal leader who makes videotapes to share stories about the past and dangers of encroaching development. Vicente Cueto […]