April 13 – Wael Shawky: Cabaret Crusades

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | April 7, 2017

The rich and provocative work of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky uses film and performance to explore the complexities of national, religious, and artistic identity. With the three-part Cabaret Crusades, he restages the medieval upheaval between Muslim and Christian worlds with a cast of exquisitely crafted marionettes and score derived from Shia lamentation criers and traditional Bahraini pearl fishing songs. Inspired by French-Lebanese author Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and based on historical accounts, Shawky meditates on religious doctrine while highlighting the secular motivations of the Crusades’ European and Arab fighters. The result is a work of major significance, one that blends film, theater, literature, history, and music, while also reflecting on the social and political landscape of the world today. In classical Arabic with English subtitles.

Shawky introduces and discusses the first two parts of the trilogy, Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show Files (2010) and Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo (2012) at 6:00 p.m. and introduces the third, Cabaret Crusades: The Secrets of Karbala (2015) at 8:15 p.m.

Presented in collaboration with SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program, which presents an artist talk by Wael Shawky on Wednesday, April 12. See www.saic.edu/vap for details.

6:00 p.m.

Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show Files
Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo

The first two episodes of Wael Shawky’s epic trilogy begins with Pope Urban II’s call to establish Christian rule throughout the Holy Land in 1095 and ends just prior to the opening battles of the Second Crusade. Featuring antique wooden marionettes from the Lupi collection in Turin and contemporary ceramic marionettes produced in collaboration with puppeteers and ceramists from Italy and France. Shawky introduces the program and participates in a post-screening discussion. In classical Arabic with English subtitles.

2010—12, Egypt/Italy/France, HD video, ca 90 min + discussion

Wael Shawky in person

8:15 p.m. 

Cabaret Crusades: The Secrets of Karbala

The concluding episode of Wael Shawky’s trilogy combines the fifth-century Battle of Karbala—the origin of the schism between Shiite and Sunni Muslims—with events of the Second and Third Crusades, concluding with the destruction of Constantinople by Venetian Crusaders in 1204. The wars’ atrocities are heightened by hand-blown Murano glass marionettes in the shape of half-human, half-animal beings. Shawky introduces the program. In classical Arabic with English subtitles.

2015, Italy/Egypt, HD video, 120 min

Wael Shawky in person

Wael Shawky frames contemporary culture through the lens of historical tradition and vice versa. In recent works, he has staged epic recreations of the medieval clashes between Muslims and Christians in his trilogy Cabaret Crusades (2010—15) and worked with child actors to recount poetic myths, paying homage, rather than mere lip service, to the important narratives of yesteryear in Al Araba Al Madfuna (2012—16). Recent solo exhibitions include Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Fondazione Merz, Turin; Lisson Gallery Milan; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Fondazione Merz, Zürich; MATHAF, Doha; MoMA PS1, New York; K20 Düsseldorf; Serpentine Galleries, London; KW Contemporary Art Institute, Berlin; Nottingham Contemporary; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Delfina Foundation, London; and Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto. He has participated in the 14th Istanbul Biennial; Sharjah Biennial 11; documenta 13; 9th Gwangju Biennale; SITE Santa Fe Biennial; 9th Istanbul Biennial, and the 50th Venice Biennale. Recent awards include the inaugural Mario Merz Prize; Award for Filmic Oeuvre created by Louis Vuitton and Kino der Kunst; Abraaj Capital Art Prize; Schering Foundation Art Award; as well as the International Commissioning Grant and an award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. In 2010, Shawky founded the educational space MASS Alexandria. He currently lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt.

On Melika Bass

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | April 5, 2017

This week, we are excited to present Devotional Animals, a screening of recent and evolving work by Chicago filmmaker (and SAIC faculty) Melika Bass. Taking an expansive and episodic approach to her films, Bass composes abstract narratives that unfold slowly to explore complicated characters, relationships, and themes.

To accompany the program, we are excerpting an essay by Karsten Lund on Bass’s ongoing film project, The Latest Sun is Sinking Fast, written on the occasion of its exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in the spring of 2015.

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The Latest Sun is Sinking Fast

Karsten Lund

In four short films, projected simultaneously in the exhibition space, Melika Bass offers four portraits of sorts. Each film centers on a single character during an extended contemplative moment: a man sits by himself in the passenger seat of his car, listening to recordings of a sermon. Another man works in his wood shop and then writes a homily of his own, speaking it aloud. In a third film, a young woman cleans herself in a church bathroom before singing a hymn at the front of an empty sanctuary. This same young woman appears in the last enigmatic film, too, crouching under a bush and washing her hands at the riverside.

Not simply portraits, these films, more precisely, are invitations to quietly observe these three people when they are unguarded and alone. Perhaps it would be better to call the films character studies instead, with the close attention that implies. Nobody gets to observe someone else in this kind of state: unaware, introspective, left entirely to one’s thoughts and habituated gestures. At least not in private, and not for long. Perhaps prompted by the characters’ own apparent religious beliefs and the ecclesiastical settings of the films, one might even go so far as to say that only God gets to observe moments like these. The medium of film here gives the viewer a kind of divine power—all-seeing but unseen by the subject. In this case the vantage point isn’t high overhead, looking down from the heavens, as one might expect; no, it is close, intimate, as if standing nearby.

Download the complete essay here.

April 6 – Melika Bass: Devotional Animals

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | April 5, 2017

Richly atmospheric, the films and installations of Chicago-based artist Melika Bass (MFA 2007) are populated by elusive figures whose enigmatic behavior suggest dark and troubling lives just beyond the screen. Working with a recurring group of performers, some of whom reappear as the same character in multiple films, Bass has developed an expansive approach to narrative: stories arc, abstract, and twist through different projects, revealing and complicating characters, relationships, and themes. She presents a selection of work from two recent and evolving projects, including Creature Companion, which features Selma Banich and Penelope Hearne engaged in a mysterious and sensual pas de deux inspired by the teachings of radical psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich. Bass also introduces a new episode in her ongoing project The Latest Sun is Sinking Fast, revisiting three isolated characters (Sarah Stambaugh, Bryan Saner, and Matthew Goulish) whose solitary habits slowly entwine.

2015-2017, USA, digital file, ca 60 min + discussion

Melika Bass in person

Melika Bass is a filmmaker and installation artist. Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2011); Comfort Station, Chicago (2012); Iceberg Projects, Chicago (2013); and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2015). International screenings and exhibitions include BFI London Film Festival; Kino der Kunst, Munich; Torino Film Festival; CPH Dox Film Festival, Copenhagen. Other screenings include the Ann Arbor Film Festival; the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; and Anthology Film Archives, New York. She is a recipient of an Artadia Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Kodak/Filmcraft Award, an Experimental Film Prize from the Athens International Film Festival, and two Media Arts Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. Bass was one of a dozen international filmmakers commissioned by Icelandic band Sigur Ros to create an original film for their Valtari Mystery Film Experiment.  She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at SAIC.

On Hyphen-Labs

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 29, 2017

This week, we are thrilled to present NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, the latest project by Hyphen-Labs, an international collective of women artists, designers, engineers, game-builders, and writers known for works that merge art, technology, and science. 

In this interview with SAIC graduate student Mev Luna, the collective shares their thoughts on Afrofuturism, virtual reality, ritual, and other concepts related to their project and overall practice. 

Mev Luna: Your latest project is titled, NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism. Afrofuturism is a term that is heralded in our contemporary moment, but can be traced all the way back to the 1970s, the root with Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place (1974). There are a lot of current manifestations of Afrofuturism in art, including the work of sound, video and installation artist Kamau Patton, who’s faculty here at SAIC; UK based conceptual artist Sonya Dyer and her collaborative project And Beyond Institute for Future Research; and the work of artist Otobong Nkanga, as discussed by scholar Denise Ferreira deSilva in e-flux journal.

How do you trace your lineage within Afrofuturism? And what aspects of the aesthetic are you drawn to?

Hyphen-Labs: We contextualize this project within the lineage of Black women’s literature, especially poetry and magical realism, Black art history and philosophy, and non-colonial scientific exploration. The themes, symbolism, language, and coded messages draw most heavily from Mother Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, Colson Whitehead, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes. From an artistic perspective Arthur Jafa and Chris Ofili were informative to our work, as well as emerging artists we encountered on Instagram. So not specifically Afrofuturism as it manifests as a categorical and theoretical framework but people of color creating work that places us firmly within the context of futurity while subverting the white “validating” gaze. The idea of performing research in public spaces also resonates with the projects so thank you for the introduction to deSilva’s work.

ML: I’ve been thinking a lot about future and how it has been invoked in discourse around the marginal body, both in Afrofuturism–as claiming a black future to be called into a present in which black lives are precarious, and Black Lives Matter has been an important invocation–and in queer theory.

Similarly, in the opening of his book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009, NYU Press), the late José Esteban Muñoz wrote that “The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”

So I am curious, what does future mean to you? And what does it’s invocation do for us in the present–when so many marginalized people in serious state of precarity, and #nofutureness?

HL: We think of the future more in the realm of quantum physics. The future moves along a continuum of infinite possibilities and because of this, speculations about the future most often tend to reflect the dominant narratives of the current society positing the ideas. In quantum theory, looking at something changes its state thus re-rendering it. We’re looking at conversations being had about the future–especially in the digital landscape–and wondering where are the folks of color are. Speculative design is highlighting driverless cars, but we have yet to see a case study featuring a black or brown perspective. We have artificial intelligence reflecting the bias of the developers programming them, and it’s mostly not people of color so what you have is the erasure of histories and mis-categorization of black and brown bodies.

The problem is the future is rarely rendered by communities of color at the level of infrastructure and implementation. Where are the black and brown architects, engineers, programmers, mathematicians, quantum theorists, aeronautical engineers, chemists, roboticist, speculative biologists, neuroscientists, immunologists etc talking about the future on a global platform? Nope, it’s Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Palmer Lucky, Mark Zuckerberg etc so current futurity is just repeating the past and present. The possibility of us starting from square one in the struggle for social justice is real unless we’re demanding our “spot at the table and bringing a chair” with us.

ML: Muñoz’s use of the word rendering reality makes me think about the medium of 3D rendering, which is also the medium of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism. The virtual reality and augmented reality artist Claudia Hart situates 3D rendering as a combination of photography and sculpture. The interface of the software, be it Maya or other softwares, is a liminal space between the body and the screen. It’s post photography–and considering the vast ability to download 3D models from the internet or to scan ANYTHING and import it into 3D space–it is also a very postmodern medium.

Where did the collective’s interest emerge in working in this medium? And what does 3D rendering allow for in your project that other mediums do not?

HL: We chose the 3D medium because it is what we know and it is a space that evolves very rapidly. Trained as architects and engineers, our designs are constrained by this world’s physical systems, existing infrastructures, and material properties.  In 3D, theses constraints drop away and we are able to express alternative pasts, presents and futures.

ML: 3D renderings are used more and more in commercial design, and given that Hyphen-Labs is a design firm as well as artistic endeavor, are you interested in this medium because of the aesthetic slickness it offers which is so readily found in contemporary design?

HL: Yes. As architects and engineers, 3D modeling, prototyping and digital fabrication have always been part of our work experience and we use 3D rendering to prototype what ifs… VR is an interesting medium because it fits the story we want to tell. Allowing audience to be enveloped in the materiality of our world and walk away having experienced many “feelings”.

ML: It seems as though the Beauty Salon is both a design implementation and a ritual. Not only a way to address the contentious issue of how the mainstream treats black hair, from Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair (2016) to Phoebe Robinson’s book You Can’t Touch My Hair (2016, Penguin Random House), but also the black ritual of hair braiding. Do you see this work as ritual?

HL: This work is ritual at its core. We hear from black women who have done the experience that it felt familiar and safe. In this time where the black body is endangered, where black and brown women are being abducted a few miles from our nation’s capital and no one is talking about it, we wanted to build a space of ritual, self-realization, and reflection. Black hair holds our ase and our philosophy.

March 30 – Hyphen-Labs NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 17, 2017

Hyphen-Labs is an international collective of women artists, designers, engineers, game-builders, and writers known for works that merge art, technology, and science. Their latest project, the multi-platform NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism uses video, virtual reality, and medical imaging to explore Black women’s contributions to science while raising issues of identity and perception. Set in a future “neurocosmetology lab,” where Black women pioneer brain modulation and cognitive enhancement by embedding electrodes into extensions and braiding techniques, the piece reimagines technologies of beauty as media for scientific and social experimentation. Hyphen-Labs presents and discusses the project, while inviting viewers to help produce new images and avatars of Black women to reprogram our digital and physical realities.‌

Presented in collaboration with Black Cinema House.

2017, USA, multiple formats, ca 60 min + discussion

Hyphen-Labs members Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ashley Baccus-Clark, Ece Tankal, Nitzan Bartov in person

Carmen Aguilar y Wedge is a Cuban-Mexican-American engineer, artist, and researcher. In 2014, she cofounded Hyphen-Labs, an international team of women with backgrounds in art, design, engineering, science, and architecture who synthesize art and technology to create meaningful experiences. Emphasizing experimentation and alternative education, the team finds creative solutions and applications to complex problems using new media, emerging technology, robotics, and computation.

Ashley Baccus-Clark is a molecular and cellular biologist, and multidisciplinary artist who uses new media and storytelling to explore themes of deep learning, cognition, memory, trauma, and systems of belief.

Ece Tankal is an architect, moving-image maker, and multidisciplinary designer from Istanbul, living in Barcelona. She is one of the cofounders of Hyphen-Labs and operates at the intersection of art and human interaction to craft experiences that go beyond visual perception, performing tangible outcomes.

Nitzan Bartov is an architect, game designer and artist based in Brooklyn and Tel Aviv. She is a co-founder of n-Dimensional game studio and a recent member of Hyphen-Labs collective, where she explores mixed realities in an artistic context. Reflecting the movements between media, her work is a mashup of architecture, spatial storytelling, and pop culture.‌

On Sky Hopinka

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 15, 2017

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.

In addition to this week’s screening, Hopinka’s short films will be featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial opening this month in New York.
For more insight on Hopinka’s work, we’re linking to a recent article from ArtForum written by Dennis Lim, director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Read Lim’s article here.

March 16 – Sky Hopinka: Translations and Transmutations

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 15, 2017

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 of the last speakers of Chinuk Wawa, a Native American language from the Pacific Northwest, echoes over images of memorials and contemporary structures around the city of Portland, Oregon that have complicated connections to the Chinookan people who have lived there for thousands of years. In a new work, filmed at the site of the Standing Rock resistance, the land is at once living and abstracted through history, politics, and money. Also on the program are I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become (2016), Visions of an Island (2015), and Jáaji Approx. (2015), among others. In English, Hocak, Aleut, and Chinuk Wawa with some English subtitles.  

Presented in collaboration with Video Data Bank (VDB) as part of the organization’s 40th Anniversary Year.

2015—17, USA, digital file, ca 60 min + discussion

Sky Hopinka in person

Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs, and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

On The Passion of Remembrance

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 8, 2017

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 OF SANKOFA FILM/VIDEO COLLECTIVE AND BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE written by interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco.

Read the monograph here.

March 9 – The Passion of Remembrance

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 3, 2017

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 generational conflict. Interwoven with footage of England’s inner-city riots of the early 1980s, the film is comprised of two main storylines: one features a dialogue between an allegorical Black Man and Black Woman, and the other follows the everyday experiences of the Baptiste family from the 1950s through the 1980s. A rich and complex work whose reflections reverberate today.

1986, United Kingdom, Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien/Sankofa Film and Video Collective, 16mm, 80 min

Maureen Blackwood is a writer and director. After completing a degree in media studies, she cofounded the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Her works with Sankofa include The Passion of Remembrance (1986), Looking for Langston (1988), and Dreaming Rivers (1988).  She also wrote and directed the award-winning Perfect Image? (1989) as well as A Family Called Abrew (1994), Home Away from Home (1994), and Shop of Dreams (2005).‌

Isaac Julien is an installation artist and filmmaker. His work breaks down the barriers between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theater, painting, and sculpture, and uniting these media to construct powerful visual narratives. Julien has had solo exhibitions at MAC Niterói, Rio de Janeiro (2016); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2016); the De Pont Museum, Netherlands (2015); MoMA, New York (2013); Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2012); Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2012); Bass Museum, Miami (2010); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2009); Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – do Chiado, Lisbon (2008); Kestnergesellschaft,  Hanover (2006); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2005); and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2005).‌‌

On Stacey Steers

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 2, 2017

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 opens up into a cave which opens into a laboratory; the macabre flora and fauna grow and retract; tubes and beakers carry an elixir up from the earth. Everything is breathing, wheezing but living. Within a cottage of incubating eggs, one heroine writes, “strange things are happening here, mother.”

These are the shapeshifting worlds of Stacey Steer’s collaged trilogy Phantom Canyon (2006), Night Hunter (2011) and Edge of Alchemy (2017). Each iteration of the trilogy combines victorian engravings, drawing, painting and an appropriated female figure of the silent film era: Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Janet Gaynor and an unnamed figure from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion. Each film is nearly black and white except for the sparse reds, greens and blues added to the female figures and the entities that haunt them. There is no oral language in this world, but rather an ambient chorus of sighs and whispers amidst the whistling wind and rustling forest. The result is an answer to the question: what are these women experiencing in their silence?

Separate, but united formally, each film evokes an internal/personal creation myth that pivots around the transformative nature of longing for another, nostalgia for what has been experienced and longing for possibility. Insects, serpents, eggs, vegetation, bed frames, laboratory equipment become physical embodiments of desire and fear. Manifestations of the imagination that are the result of experience outside of the body become lived experience within the psyche. Silence becomes the presence of an imaginative internalization of exterior experience.

In this way, when Lillian Gish’s figure in Night Hunter writes “strange things are happening here, mother” she invokes each layer of the self: the physical body in space, and the space created by the internal psyche through which feelings manifest as lived experience. Such that an incubating egg in the psychic space becomes an allegory for something happening to the physical body. This triple space contains terrors and pleasures, fears and desires, longing for separation and communion. What feels particularly acute about the convergence of these spaces in Steers’ work is the simultaneous collision of domestic and feral space within the terrain. Further, that such a collision has the power to haunt, comfort or turn against these female figures; but that such power is only enacted by way of the figures’ own thought patterns. Because each system is closed, the female figures appear to be enacting these terrific dreams upon herself.

Thus, our answer to the question, what are these women experiencing in their silence, seems to be an evocative, personal and perpetual self-transformation, one that is strange, beautiful, terrific and tied inextricably to femaleness.

 

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About

Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.

 

CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.

 

Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.






 

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