. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

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

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | April 19, 2023

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.

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

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

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ABOUT

Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker and researcher focusing on gender relations, collectivism, urbanism, and industrialization. Solo exhibitions include the Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); FKA Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015). Her work has also been included in Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); 5th Mardin Bienali (2022); 3rd Autostrada Biennale, Pristina (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); 2nd Lahore Biennale (2020); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019); 1st Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019), among many others. She received the Georges de Beauregard International Prize at FID Marseille (2019), the Special Prize of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation’s Future Generation Art Prize (2012), a scholarship from the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2014, and the Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo Arts and Space Residency in 2010. She is a cofounder of the 98weeks Research Project.

Deborah Stratman: Last Things

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | March 30, 2023

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.

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

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

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ABOUT

Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that question power, control, and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, broadcast, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, evolution, sisterhood, and faith.  Stratman’s work has been exhibited and awarded internationally for the past three decades. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling: How Black and South Asian Writers Imagined A City (HarperCollins), I’ll Get My Coat (Book Works), Night Haunts (Verso), and Other Musics (MoMA). His writings—on documentary and international film, experimental music, and migrant aesthetics—have appeared in journals such as Film CommentFriezeArtforumArt in AmericaWire, 4 Columns, The Guardian, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. He is an associate professor at New York University where he also directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | February 16, 2023

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

Join Mexican film collective Los Ingrávidos for an evening of mesmerizing and politically charged works.

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

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Tierra en Trance, 2022. Courtesy of the artists.

“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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PROGRAM

THE SUN QUARTET, PART 2: SAN JUAN RIVER, 2017, 16mm to digital, 13 minutes

THE SUN QUARTET, PART 4: FAR FROM AYOTZINAOA, 2017, 16mm to digital, 23 minutes

On the evening of September 26, 2014, a group of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teaching College disappeared just outside of Iguala, Mexico. THE SUN QUARTET is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city, and, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico in the wake of that fateful night.

“THE SUN QUARTET confronts the climate of corruption and violence that dominates contemporary Mexican leadership and militarism. It exemplifies the poetic operations of the collective, who reconcile elements ranging from improvisational music, superimposed cinematography, poetic texts both read and cast on screen, and documentation of protests. These elements assemble as a counter to official claims to truth regarding traumas as recent as the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural normal school that happened in Iguala, Mexico, and as distant as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a formative event in contemporary Mexican revolutionary consciousness. THE SUN QUARTET also summons resonances of older, unspeakable traumas, rifts that recede deep into the past of Mexico.” – Stephen Broomer

TIERRA EN TRANCE, 2022, 16mm, 38 minutes

“These are the dancing bodies in an agitated rapture: prelude to trance, invocation of the gods, consecration of intermittence. Here our point of view sparkles under the spell and trance of things gathered, fallen, yielding, pluvial, Mesoamerican wind, goddess breath, breeze of sticks, percussive woods. Here the audiovisual diagram that guides us, the kinetic breath that inspires us, the serpentine spear that snatches us away, the agitated plumes that trembles at us are the sound and rumble of Teponaztli, a Mesoamerican percussive instrument: serpentine, dancing, bouncing sticks, trunks, branches and wood. Kinetic and audiovisual serialism from the embers of the Earth. This is the Earth in a trance.” – Colectivo Los Ingrávido

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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.

Electric Visions: Chicago’s Groundbreaking Video and Computer Art

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | February 9, 2023

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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PROGRAM

CIRCLE 9 SUNRISE, Barbara Sykes, Tom DeFanti, and Drew Browning 1976, ca 9 min

[ZGrass Demo], Phil Morton, Tom DeFanti, and Dan Sandin, 1976, ca 8 min

A MOVEMENT WITHIN, Barbara Sykes, 1976 ca 8 min

“Moon,” excerpted from PROGRAM 9: AMATEUR TV, Phil Morton and Jane Veeder, 1979, ca 2 min

MONTANA, Jane Veeder, 1982, 3 min

BALLYOID CARDIODS, Copper Giloth, 1979, 3 min

SKIPPY PEANUT BUTTER JARS, Copper Giloth, 1980, 3 min

RIP [Sequence 1], Jamie Fenton, 1979, ca 2 min

RIP [Sequence 4], Jamie Fenton, and Dick Ainsworth, 1979, ca 2 min

“From Video Games to Video Art,” Copper Giloth Interview with Bob Sirott, CBS News, 1980, ca 1 min

WARP IT OUT DEMO, Jane Veeder, 1982, ca 5 min

DIGITAL TV DINNER, Jamie Fenton, Raul Zaritsky, and Dick Ainsworth, 1979, ca 3 min

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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.

Announcing Spring 2023

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | January 10, 2023

Join us for the spring 2023 season of Conversations at the Edge!

A bright pink and green computer generated abstraction.

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

A multiple exposure film still featuring brightly colored feathers.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Tierra en Trance, 2022, Courtesy of the artists

Deborah Stratman, Last Things, 2023, Courtesy of the artist

Two digital figures dance in front of a black and white photo.

Claudia Hart, Memory Theater, 2023, Courtesy of the artist

Two figures sitting at a table in a lush green landscape.

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

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

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

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 Weerasethakul (04/27), and ELECTRIC  VISIONS, a program of early Chicago video art with artists Jamie Fenton, Jane Veeder, Barbara Sykes, Copper Giloth (2/9).

 Visit www.saic.edu/cate for season details.

Thanks to our partners Video Data Bank, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Media Burn Archive, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, the Block Museum, and Northwestern University’s Department of Radio/TV/Film.

Make sure to follow us on social media (Conversations at the Edge is now on Instagram) for all CATE updates!

Thank you! Fall 2023

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | January 5, 2023

Thank you to everyone who made this season possible!

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

Tiffany Sia, What Rules the Invisible, 2022. Courtesy of the artist

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 scholars who conversed with them: Bruce Jenkins, Greg Pierce, Chris Sullivan, and Melika Bass.

Thanks to our partners Video Data Bank, the Gene Siskel Film Center, SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program, and DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts. 

And we’d like to thank you, our audience, for joining us in the theater this past year.

Make sure to follow us on social media (Conversations at the Edge is now on Instagram) for all CATE updates!

Tiffany Sia: Do Not Circulate

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | December 7, 2022

Thursday, December 01, 6:00 p.m.

Join artist, filmmaker, and writer Tiffany Sia for a screening of her urgent and revelatory film/video works

A screen shot of a tweet of a video of a camera flash on a subway station

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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PROGRAM

NEVER REST/UNREST, 2020, Hong Kong, 28 minutes
Growing out of a series of the artist’s Instagram stories tracking the relentless political turmoil in Hong Kong throughout 2019, NEVER REST/UNREST provides a vertically oriented, hand-held counter narrative to sensationalist international reportage. In doing so, Sia takes up Cuban revolutionary filmmaker Julio García Espinosa’s call for an anti-colonial “Imperfect Cinema” that resists convention, fabrication, and authority.

DO NOT CIRCULATE, 2021, Hong Kong, 17 minutes
In DO NOT CIRCULATE, Sia follows the image trail of the Prince Edward Station Attack, an event during Hong Kong’s 2019 demonstrations in which police indiscriminately attacked protestors at a subway station, juxtaposing imagery uploaded by witnesses during the event with official accounts. A relentless voiceover weaves through disinformation, rumors, and superstition.

WHAT RULES THE INVISIBLE, 2022, USA, 10 minutes
WHAT RULES THE INVISIBLE juxtaposes amateur travelogue footage shot throughout 20th century Hong Kong with Sia’s mother’s accounts of colonial police raids, sewage, and ghosts in postwar Kowloon.

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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].

Andy Warhol’s Batman Dracula

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | November 3, 2022

Thursday, November 03, 6:00 p.m.

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.

Dracula bites the neck of a shirtless black man

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

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ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Bruce Jenkins is professor of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to coming to SAIC, he was Stanley Cavell Curator at the Harvard Film Archive. Jenkins previously served as curator of Film/Video at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), where he collaborated on exhibitions devoted to Chantal Akerman, Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Conner, Chris Marker, William Klein, and the Fluxus group. He has written exhibition catalog essays for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Museo Reina Sofía; the Guggenheim Museum; and the Wexner Center, among others. His critical writings have appeared in Artforum, October, Mousse Magazine, and Millennium Film Journal. He has authored a book-length study on the work of Gordon Matta-Clark; edited a volume of writings by Hollis Frampton; and written the principal essays for monographic publications on Michael Snow, Matt Saunders, and Basim Magdy. His most recent project is as principal co-author of The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963–1965 (2021).

Greg Pierce is director of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum, where he has worked since April 1994. He has worked as an instructor, projectionist, assistant operations manager, and technical coordinator at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Chicago Filmmakers, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. At The Warhol, his exhibitions include Neke Carson: Eyeball Portraits and Beyond + Neke Paints Andy ’72 (2008), SuperTrash (curated with Jacques Boyreau, 2009), and I Just Want to Watch: Andy Warhol’s Film, Video, and Television (curated with Geralyn Huxley, 2010). He designed the museum’s Screen Test Machine, which has been in constant use since it launched in the summer of 2012. His evocation in gallery form of Warhol’s multi-media event Exploding Plastic Inevitable has been seen in museums around the world. His writing on Warhol has appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Stedelijk Museum and the Montreal Museum, as well as The Warhol. Pierce is the custodian of The Orgone Archive (ex-Orgone Cinema), a proudly fringe, regional motion picture archive and screening outfit based in Pittsburgh that he co-founded in 1993 along with two other film artists/advocates. The archive holds over 10,000 unique and neglected regular 8, super 8, and 16mm films. He is also the drummer of the experimental pop quartet Her Suit and soon to be the ex-lead guitarist in his daughter’s band Merce Lemon.

Anxious Bodies

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | October 27, 2022

Thursday, October 27, 6:00 p.m.

Join us for this striking program of animated films exploring bodies, relationships, and power. Presented in partnership with DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts.

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

Yoriko Mizushiri, Anxious Body, 2021. Courtesy of Miyu.

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 complex boundaries between desire, shame, repulsion, and fear. All were produced by or in cooperation with Miyu, the French production company behind some of the last decade’s most striking and challenging animated films.

Multiple directors, 2017-22, France/Denmark/Japan/Germany/Hungary/Israel, ca 60 minutes plus audience discussion
Digital video
In English, French, and Hebrew with English subtitles

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PROGRAM

ANXIOUS BODY, Yoriko Mizushiri, 2022, 2D digital, 6 minutes
Living things, artificial things, and the space in between. The sensuousness of touch, pain, and pleasure rendered through kaleidoscopic shapes and scalpel-sharp lines.

SYMBIOSIS, Nadja Andrasev, 2019, 2D animation collage and pixilation, 13 minutes
A betrayed wife starts to investigate her husband’s mistresses. Her jealousy is gradually replaced by curiosity.

EGG, Martina Scarpelli, 2018, hand-drawn animation, 11 minutes
A woman is locked in her home with an egg, which she is both attracted to and repulsed by. She eats the egg, she repents. She kills it. She lets the egg die of hunger. Based on a small yet significant moment of the director’s own life.

JUST A GUY, Shoko Hara, 2021, stop-motion, cut-outs, and 2D animation, 15 minutes
Three women contemplate their relationship with convicted serial killer Richard Ramirez.

CLEMENCE’S AFTERNOON, Lénaïg Le Moigne, 2017, hand-drawn animation, 10 minutes
When Clemence and her parents arrive late to a big country picnic, the bucolic setting belies the sense of creeping dread evoked through the cruel games of the other children already playing there.

LETTER TO A PIG, Tal Kantor, 2022, hand-drawn animation and live action, 10 minutes
A Holocaust survivor reads a letter he wrote to the pig who saved his life. During his testimony, a young student sinks into a dark reverie, meditating on collective trauma, vengeance, human evil, and compassion.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Yoriko Mizushiri is a freelance film director from Aomori Prefecture in Japan. Her works offer new perspectives on the body through her use of movement, pastel colors, and a focus on tiny gestures. They have garnered awards at some of the most important festivals for animation, including the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Animafest Zagreb. Mizushiri graduated from the Joshibi University of Art and Design in Sagamihara, Japan.

Nadja Andrasev is a Hungarian animator. Her film SYMBIOSIS won the Jury Award for Best Animated Short at South by Southwest in 2020. Since then, the film has been selected at over 100 festivals, winning 24 prizes, including the Zlatko Grgić Award for Best First Film at Animafest Zagreb and Best International Short at Riga International Film Festival, as well as being qualified for the Oscars and shortlisted for a César Award in 2021. Andrasev graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest in 2015.

Martina Scarpelli is an Italian filmmaker with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Academy of Brera in Milan and a bachelor’s degree in Animation from Experimental Center of Cinematography in Turin, where she graduated in 2015 with the film COSMOETICO.

Shoko Hara was born in Okayama, Japan and emigrated to Germany at the age of 10. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Media Design at the DHBW Ravensburg. She studied motion design at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg from 2012-16, with an emphasis on analogue and experimental works in graphic design and art. She currently teaches motion graphics at the DHBW Ravensburg and works as a freelance motion designer and animation director for commercials, spots, and music videos.

Lénaïg Le Moigne is a French animator. She graduated from the School of Animation Cinema Professions (EMCA) in 2015.

Tal Kantor is an award-winning independent animation filmmaker and visual artist. In her animated works, Tal uses a unique technique combining drawing, photography, video, painting, and animation. She received her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where she currently lectures at the Screen-Based Arts Department. She is also an animation director and concept-art developer for numerous films and art projects.

Marta Pajek: Impossible Figures and Other Stories

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | October 20, 2022

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

Join acclaimed Polish animator Marta Pajek for a screening of her recently completed trilogy IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES AND OTHER STORIES. Presented in partnership with DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts.

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

Marta Pajek, Impossible Figures and Other Stories II, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Animoon

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 figure—a drawing that follows the rules of perspective but cannot exist in reality—as both a motif and central metaphor. Each film uses a physical space—a house, the space between two lovers, a city—to examine intimate and global anxieties about gender, sexuality, liberation, and political violence. In IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES AND OTHER STORIES II (2017), a young woman confronts the disorienting demands of domesticity; in IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES AND OTHER STORIES III (2018), a couple sinks into a psychosexual romance; and in IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES AND OTHER STORIES I (2021), a grand dame explores the architecture of idealism, authoritarianism, and self-destruction. Pajek will join the program virtually to discuss the ideas and images that inspired the triptych, as well as her distinctive style.

Marta Pajek, 2017-21, Poland / Canada, ca 50 minutes plus audience discussion
Digital video
In Polish and German with English subtitles

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ABOUT

Marta Pajek is an animator from Kielce, Poland. She studied with renowned Polish animator Jerzy Kucia at Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and Estonian animator Priit Pärn at the Turku Arts Academy. Her striking animations employ a minimal palette, clean lines, and negative space, cohesively merging hand-drawn animation with CGI. Her films include AFTER APPLES (2004), NEXTDOOR (2005), SLEEPINCORD (2011) and the acclaimed IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES AND OTHER STORIES trilogy. She has received multiple awards for her works, which have screened around the world, including, among others, the Cannes Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and Tricky Women/Tricky Realities, as well as the GLAS Animation Festival, and Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Films, both of which awarded her their grand prize.

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