Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 24, 2020
Linda Mary Montano in person
Linda Mary Montano, still from I’m Dying – My Last Performance, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and SAIC’s Video Data Bank.
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).
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 20, 2020
Curator Greg de Cuir Jr. in person
Julia Lazarkova, still from Reversal of Essence, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 17, 2020
Curator Greg de Cuir Jr. and artist Edgar Arceneaux in person
Baloji, still from Zombies, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Sudu Connexion.
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.
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 10, 2020
Lori Felker in person
Lori Felker, still from I Can’t (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | February 3, 2020
Vaginal Davis in person
Vaginal Davis, still from The White to be Angry, 1999. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | January 20, 2020
Baloji, still from Zombies, 2019. As part of the Avant-Noir program, curated by Greg de Cuir Jr., on February 20. Courtesy of the artist and Sudu Connexion.
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).
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | December 1, 2019
Thank you for joining us for our Fall 2019 season! See you in January 2020!
Selina Trepp, still from I Work With What I Have, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Tomek Popakul, still from Acid Rain, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Zach Blas, still from Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033, 2017. Starring Susanne Sachsse and Cassils. Courtesy of the artist.
Narcisa Hirsch, still from Werner Nekes, 1980. Courtesy of the artist.
Rachel Rossin, still from The Sky is a Gap, 2017-19. Courtesy of the artist.
Shengze Zhu, still from Present.Perfect., 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Hiwa K, still from Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
Filipa César, still from Spell Reel, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and SAIC’s Video Data Bank.
Stephanie Comilang, still from Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise), 2016. Image courtesy of Vtape.org.
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | November 19, 2019
Curator Aily Nash in person
Re:Working Labor curators Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg in person
Stephanie Comilang, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise), 2016. Image courtesy of Vtape.org
Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Re:Working Labor at SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Image Employment presents a selection of recent moving image works that investigate various modes of contemporary labor and production. Curated by Aily Nash and Andrew Norman Wilson, the program explores the growing confluence of human and machinic technologies, corporate lifestyle, globalized capitalism’s and its extraction and exploitation of workers and the environment, and the psychic effects of these forms of labor. Nash introduces the program and joins Re:Working Labor curators Daniel Eisenberg, Professor of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation and Ellen Rothenberg, Adjunct Professor of Fiber and Material Studies in discussion afterward. Works include Harun Farocki’s A New Product (2012), Stephanie Comilang’s Come to me Paradise (2016), and Jenn Nkiru’s Black to Techno (2019).
2012–19, United States/United Kingdom/Hong Kong/Canada/Germany, multiple formats, ca 75 minutes followed by discussion
Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, as part of the exhibition Re:Working Labor, on view September 21-November 27, 2019.
Aily Nash is a curator based in New York. She is co-curator of the Projections section of the New York Film Festival and program advisor to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Short Film section. She served as a biennial advisor and co-curator of the film program for the 2017 Whitney Biennial and was head of programming for the 2018 edition of the Images Festival in Toronto. She has curated programs and exhibitions for MoMA PS1, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastian, Spain; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Image Forum, Tokyo; Ghost:2561, Bangkok; and others. She curated five seasons of the Basilica Screenings series at Basilica Hudson (2012–16). In 2015, she was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | November 17, 2019
Filipa César in person
Filipa César, Spell Reel, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist and SAIC’s Video Data Bank.
The genre-bending work of Portuguese artist Filipa César takes up the legacies of European colonialism, focusing on moments and movements of resistance. In 2012, she began investigating a trove of footage documenting Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence from Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s. Long thought to be lost, these films mark the birth of a national cinema and the aesthetic strategy of decolonization under revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral. In collaboration with two of the surviving filmmakers, Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, César digitized and toured the material across Europe and Africa. Spell Reel layers the original revolutionary films with talkbacks from these events to offer a collaborative reflection on Guinea-Bissau’s history and a prismatic vision for its future.
2017, Germany/Guinea-Bissau, 96 minutes followed by discussion
Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Video Data Bank
Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the politics and poetics inherent to imaging technologies. Since 2011, she has been researching the origins of the cinema of the African liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau as a laboratory of resistance. The resulting body of work comprises 16mm films, digital archives, videos, seminars, screenings, publications, ongoing collaborations with artists, theorists, and activists, and is the basis for her PhD thesis at Faculty of Social and Human Sciences-New University of Lisbon. César’s genre-bending film and video work bridges contemporary and historical discourses, also apparent in her writings, such as her essay “Meteorizations,” published in the Third Text special issue, and “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions,” edited by Shela Sheik and Ros Gray. Selected exhibitions and screenings have taken place at the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010); Manifesta 8, Cartagena, Colombia (2010); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011–15); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012); Khiasma, Paris (2011–15); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2013); SAAVY Contemporary, Berlin (2014–15); Tensta konsthall, Stockholm (2015); Mumok, Vienna (2016); Contour Biennale 8, Mechelen, Belgium; Gasworks, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); The Harvard Art Museums, Boston (2018), and The Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019).
Posted by | mnguyen6 | Posted on | November 4, 2019
Hiwa K in person
Hiwa K, Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), 2017. Image courtesy of the artist, KOW Berlin, and Prometeogallery di Isa Pisani, Milan/Lucca.
Drawing from individual stories, political actions, and his own experience fleeing Iraq by foot in the late 1990s, the deeply moving and often darkly absurd films, performances, and installations of Iraqi-German artist Hiwa K explore our most pressing issues—displacement, war, and identity. In videos like Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (2017) or A View From Above (2017), both produced for documenta 14, the artist allegorizes the fragmentation and precariousness of migration. In others, he stages collaborative interventions in sites of political trauma, including a former detention center for political prisoners, a civil protest in the Kurdish region of Iraq, and a scrapyard devoted to smelting battlefield waste. Hiwa K shows a selection of these works and discusses the ideas and approaches that inform his broader practice.
2006–19, Iraq/Turkey/Greece/Italy/Germany, multiple formats, ca 60 minutes followed by discussion
Presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Chicago
Berlin-based artist Hiwa K studied informally and independently in his hometown, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, focusing on European literature and philosophy available in Arabic. After moving to Germany in 2002, he became a music student of the flamenco master, Paco Peña. His referential repository consists of stories told by family members and friends, found situations, and everyday forms that are the products of pragmatism and necessity. Hiwa K has had major exhibitions at S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium; New Museum, New York; Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Venice Biennale; La Triennale, Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Manifesta 7, Bolzano, Italy. He is the recipient of prestigious awards including the Hector Prize for Contemporary Art, the Arnold Bode Prize, and the Schering Stiftung Art Award.
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