Fall 2020 Season Announcement

Posted by | dmwaur | Posted on | August 20, 2020

We’re pleased to announce the Fall 2020 season of Conversations at the Edge! Throughout the season, we’ll be hosting virtual artist talks and events alongside on-demand screenings. Join us for programs with Alison O’Daniel (Oct 1), American Artist (Oct 8), Delinda Collier (Oct 15), Ursula Biemann (Oct 22), and Auriea and Michaël Samyn (Oct 28).  

All programs are free, captioned, and take place in the Gene Siskel Film Center’s virtual cinema. Full details at www.saic.edu/cate.

Remainder of Spring 2020 – Postponed

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | March 26, 2020

We regret to announce that the remainder of Conversations at the Edge‘s Spring 2020 season has been postponed for a later date. This includes An Evening with Ian Cheng, This Set of Actions is a Mirror, Wong Ping: Digital Fables, McKenzie Wark and Legacy Russell: Culture That Loves Us. In accordance with the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), SAIC has suspended all on-campus events, exhibitions, and programming. For more information please visit saic.edu/alerts.

March 12 – Beatrice Gibson: Two Sisters – POSTPONED

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | March 9, 2020

Beatrice Gibson in person

In response to the CDC’s guidance on COVID-19, the 30th annual Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, has been postponed. Beatrice Gibson: Two Sisters has been cancelled and will be rescheduled at a later date.

Incorporating experimental music, poetry, and improvisation, the award-winning films of London-based artist Beatrice Gibson are shape-shifting explorations of social and political turmoil. In two powerful, deeply connected works—I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018), which takes its title from a poem by CAConrad, and Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters) (2019), based on a screenplay by Gertrude Stein—Gibson defines the nature of motherhood and community in an age of contemporary anxiety. Weaving together images of joy and horror with readings by Conrad, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, filmmakers Ana Vaz and Basma Alsharif, as well as friends and family, Gibson builds an archive of stories, at once triumphant and traumatic, cynical and optimistic, toward a collective future.

2018–19, France/United Kingdom, DCP, ca 50 minutes followed by discussion. 

Presented in partnership with the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, a project of Chicago Filmmakers.

Beatrice Gibson is an artist and filmmaker based in London. In 2019 she had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre in London; Bergen Kunsthall in Norway; and Mercer Union in Toronto. She has twice won the Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2009/13). In 2015 she won the 17th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel, Switzerland, and more recently was the recipient of the Marian McMahon Akimbo Award at the 2019 Images Festival in Toronto. Her latest film premiered at Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors’ Fortnight), Cannes Film Festival 2019.

March 5 – Mariah Garnett: Trouble

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | March 3, 2020

Mariah Garnett in person

In the early 1970s, Mariah Garnett’s father fled Northern Ireland after being the subject of a BBC documentary about relationships that crossed the country’s violent religious and political divide. Four decades later, the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker returned to her father’s native Belfast, immersing herself in the city’s sectarian upheavals to make her own film about his early life. Named one of Sight & Sound’s best films of 2019, Trouble mixes archival footage, contemporary interviews, and a series of extraordinary performances in which Garnett plays her father, reenacting both the BBC documentary and his present-day reflections on the period. Through its multifaceted form, the film depicts the complexities of identity and the echoing effects of personal and historical trauma.

2019, United Kingdom/United States, DCP, 83 minutes followed by discussion.

Mariah Garnett mixes documentary, narrative, and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that deconstructs the conventional hierarchy between filmmaker and subject which has historically represented the purview of directors who are economically, racially, and gender privileged. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, UK; ltd los angeles; and Louis B. James, New York. Screenings and other exhibitions include the New Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; REDCAT, Los Angeles; BFI Southbank, London; New York Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; and Made in L.A. 2014, the Hammer Museum biennial. She has received awards from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2015), California Community Fund (2014), Artadia Los Angeles (2016), and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in film/video (2019).

Feb 27 – Linda Mary Montano: Laughing, Crying, Living Art

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 24, 2020

Linda Mary Montano in person

Linda Mary Montano is renowned for videos and endurance-based performances that dissolve the boundaries between art and life. In works like Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984, a collaboration with Tehching Hsieh, she spent a year bound to the artist by an eight-foot rope; in 14 Years of Living Art (1984–98), she wore monochromatic clothing, devoted herself to meditative practice, and provided monthly “Art/Life Counseling” at the New Museum in New York (1984–91). Her transformative videos draw upon her biography, from the murder of her ex-husband in the powerfully cathartic Mitchell’s Death (1977) to the humor of the everyday. For this special evening, Montano performatively discusses her body of work, presents a selection of videos, and guides the audience through an interactive healing modality that alternates between laughing and crying, embodying the fundamentally empathic nature of her practice.

1977–2019, United States, digital video and live performance, ca 90 minutes followed by discussion.

With a background in sculpture, Zen Buddhism, and Catholicism, Linda Mary Montano turned to performance and video in the 1970s, establishing herself with endurance performances like Handcuff (1973 with Tom Marioni), and as well as a series of performance videos. From 1984 onwards, she embarked on two seven-year projects, titled 14 Years of Living Art, each conceived around the seven chakras. In 1998, she opened the Kingston Art/Life Institute and in 2005, she opened the Saugerties Art/Life Institute and Transfiguration Hospital to teach others her approach to merging art and life. Recent exhibitions include Linda Mary Montano: Always Creative, SITE: Santa Fe, New Mexico (2003); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MoMA PS1, New York; and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860–1989, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She is the author of seven books, including Letters from Linda M. Montano, (Routledge, 2005) and Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (University of California Press, 2000).

Feb 22 – South by Southeast

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 20, 2020

Curator Greg de Cuir Jr. in person

While the countries in southern and eastern Europe share common histories and cultures, they have alternately been classified as Balkan and Mediterranean, as capitalist and socialist, as Western and non-Western, and as European and non-European. South by Southeast convenes a wide range of artistic works, many of which are screening for the first time in the United States, to deconstruct both geopolitical and aesthetic boundaries while mapping out a new conception of Europe. Originally established by Belgrade-based curator Greg de Cuir Jr. as an annual program of the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade, this edition features works produced for cinemas, galleries, and the internet by Damir Čučić, Armando Lulaj, Igor Simić, Peter Lichter, Julia Lazarkova, Diana Vidrascu, belit sağ, and Igor Bošnjak.

2017–19, multiple directors, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 60 minutes followed by discussion.

Greg de Cuir Jr. is an independent curator, writer, and translator who lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. Curatorial projects include the Black Light retrospective at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland (2019); Kevin Jerome Everson, The Abstract Ideal at the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia (2019); 21st Century Žilnik at Close-Up Film Centre and LUX in London; the 64th annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in Hamilton, New York (with Kevin Jerome Everson, 2018); Affinities, or The Weight of Cinema (with Kevin Jerome Everson) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2018), among many others. De Cuir is managing editor of the journal NECSUS (Amsterdam University Press), editor of the Eastern European Screen Cultures book series (Amsterdam University Press), and member of the editorial board of the Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image book series (Palgrave Macmillan). His essays have been published in Cineaste, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Millennium Film Journal, ARTMargins, and Politika, among others. Since 2008 he has worked as selector for Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade. 

 

Feb 20 – Avant-Noir

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 17, 2020

Curator Greg de Cuir Jr. and artist Edgar Arceneaux in person

Conceived by Belgrade-based curator Greg de Cuir Jr. as an “intervention into the status quo,” Avant-Noir brings together contemporary films and videos by international artists of African descent to showcase visual representations of Black cultures in their many complexities. Part of a much larger project of iterative screenings and exhibitions, this special edition spotlights works from the last two years. Baloji’s stunning Zombies (2019) is both an Afrofuturist music video and satire of digital consumer culture. Ayo Akingbade’s poetic A is for Artist (2018) charts the artist’s growing political consciousness. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s A Quality of Light (2019) is an Afrosurrealist portrait of the artist’s composer grandmother. Edgar Arceneaux’s Until, Until, Until… (2017–18) probes the history of African American representation on stage and screen through the bifocal lens of Broadway actor Ben Vereen and vaudeville star Bert Williams, America’s first mainstream Black entertainer.

2017–19, multiple directors, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 90 minutes followed by discussion.

Greg de Cuir Jr. is an independent curator, writer, and translator who lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. Curatorial projects include the Black Light retrospective at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland (2019); Kevin Jerome Everson, The Abstract Ideal at the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia (2019); 21st Century Žilnik at Close-Up Film Centre and LUX in London; the 64th annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in Hamilton, New York (with Kevin Jerome Everson, 2018); Affinities, or The Weight of Cinema (with Kevin Jerome Everson) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2018), among many others. De Cuir is managing editor of the journal NECSUS (Amsterdam University Press), editor of the Eastern European Screen Cultures book series (Amsterdam University Press), and member of the editorial board of the Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image book series (Palgrave Macmillan). His essays have been published in Cineaste, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Millennium Film Journal, ARTMargins, and Politika, among others. Since 2008 he has worked as selector for Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade. 

Feb 13 – Lori Felker: Intrusions and Interruptions

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 10, 2020

Lori Felker in person

Known for genre-bending explorations of human relationships, award-winning filmmaker Lori Felker (MFA 2007) debuts a collection of slippery, semiautobiographical tales of motherhood, miscarriages, and missing people. In Spontaneous (2020) she charts the loss of her pregnancy during the Slamdance Film Festival premiere of her short Discontinuity (2016), highlighting the chasm between her body’s slow-moving tragedy and the celebrity-studded celebrations around her. Not You (2020), starring both Felker and her daughter, relays the disorienting experience of new motherhood. I Can’t (2020) is an angry elegy produced on the occasion of a friend’s untimely passing. Felker presents these alongside a selection of earlier works, including Discontinuity and the haunting Memoria Data (2018), among others, and discusses her overall practice.

2016–20, United States, DCP, ca 75 minutes followed by discussion.

Lori Felker is a filmmaker, artist, teacher, programmer, and performer based in Chicago. Her moving image work focuses on the ways in which we process, share, and disseminate information, via screens, dreams, gestures, games, and dialogue. Felker’s work has screened internationally, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands; New York Film Festival; VideoEx, Zurich; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; Festival du nouveau cinéma, Montreal; Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival, Portugal; Los Angeles Filmforum; BAMcinemaFest, New York; Space Gallery, Pittsburgh. She is an Illinois Arts Council Agency Artist Project grant recipient, a Wexner Center artist in residence, and a Fulbright Fellow. Felker is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

 

Feb 6 – An Evening with Vaginal Davis

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 3, 2020

Vaginal Davis in person

Vaginal Davis is a key figure in the history of queer music, performance, and video art. She emerged from Los Angeles’s 1970s queer and punk performance scenes, creating her own mythology during live shows with her “multiracial, maxi-gendered” bands. She turned to video in the late 1980s, mixing identity, fiction, and critique in satiric narratives, underground documentaries, and a video offshoot of her influential zine Fertile La Toya Jackson. In conjunction with the exhibition, The White to be Angry at the Art Institute of Chicago (February 1–April 26, 2020), Davis presents a selection of some of her most significant video works from the 1980s and 1990s and joins Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow Solveig Nelson for a discussion of the period.

1986–99, United States, digital video, ca 75 minutes followed by discussion.

Presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Society for Contemporary Art.

Vaginal Davis is a performer and artist who is based in Berlin. Davis has performed widely, including recently for documenta 14. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019); Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon (2018); and Liste Art Fair Basel, Switzerland (2018); as well as 80WSE (2016); INVISIBLE-EXPORTS (2015); the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2015); and PARTICIPANT INC. (2012), all in New York. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); New Museum, New York (2017); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania (2009); the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia (2009); and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2008), among many others. She will participate in the Gwangju Biennial 2020. Davis was a member of the Los Angeles–based punk bands Pedro, Muriel, and Esther (PME), Black Fag, Afro Sisters, and ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo. A prolific filmmaker, she has also produced zines and many other publications.

 

Spring 2020 Season Announcement

Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | January 20, 2020

We’re pleased to announce the Spring 2020 season of Conversations at the Edge! We have a spectacular program lined up, including appearances by media artists  Vaginal Davis (Feb 6); Lori Felker (Feb 13); Linda Mary Montano (Feb 27); Mariah Garnett (March 5); Beatrice Gibson (March 12); Ian Cheng (March 24), and Wong Ping (April 9), as well as curators Greg de Cuir Jr., with a program on international diasporic Black filmmakers (Feb 20) and Southern and Eastern European filmmakers (Feb 22); Minh Nguyen, with a program titled This Set of Actions is a Mirror (April 2); and Thoma Foundation Digital Arts Writing Award winners McKenzie Wark and Legacy Russell (April 16).

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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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