Marwa Arsanios: Who Is Afraid of Ideology, Part 1 and Part 2

A women stands in a deserted landscape looking seriosly at the camera.

Wednesday, April 19, 6:00 p.m. “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 […]

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Deborah Stratman: Last Things

An outcropping of rocks with a bright light shining from them.

Thursday, March 30, 6:00 and 8:30 p.m. “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 […]

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Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Close up of a multi-colored feathered head piece in movement.

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 […]

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Electric Visions: Chicago’s Groundbreaking Video and Computer Art

Thursday, February 09, 6:00 p.m. “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 […]

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Announcing Spring 2023

Join us for the spring 2023 season of Conversations at the Edge! The series returns to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Gene Siskel Film Center (164 North State Street) for screenings and artist appearances, including Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (2/16), Deborah Stratman (3/30), Claudia Hart (4/6), Marwa Arsanios (4/19 and 4/20), Apichatpong […]

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Thank you! Fall 2023

Two silhouettes look at land from behind the sail ropes of a ship.

Thank you to everyone who made this season possible! We are so appreciative of the amazing artists who shared their works, time, and ideas with us: Jessica Bardsley, Tsai Ming-Liang, Marta Pajek, Yoriko Mizushiri, Martina Scarpelli, Shoko Hara, Nadja Andrasev, Lénaïg Le Moigne, and Tal Kantor, and Tiffany Sia as well as the artists and […]

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Andy Warhol’s Batman Dracula

Dracula bites the neck of a shirtless black man

Thursday, November 03, 6:00 p.m. 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 […]

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Anxious Bodies

Soft pastel colored abstraction that resembles the figure of a women with dark hair.

Thursday, October 27, 6:00 p.m. Anxious Bodies explores the fraught terrain of bodies, relationships, and power through the work of six award-winning contemporary women animators, including Yoriko Mizushiri, Martina Scarpelli, Shoko Hara, Nadja Andrasev, Lénaïg Le Moigne, and Tal Kantor. Through sinewy line drawings, lush water colors, and striking, multidimensional collages, their films mine the […]

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Marta Pajek: Impossible Figures and Other Stories

Stylized black and white drawing of a woman with splashes of bright color for her make-up

Thursday, October 20, 6:00 p.m. Marta Pajek is known for unsettling and enigmatic films about dreams, relationships, and women’s lives. Her latest is the award-winning triptych IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES AND OTHER STORIES, released as a series of individual films over six years. Rendered in elegant, ever-morphing black and white line animations, the trilogy uses the impossible […]

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