Tsai Ming-Liang

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

Monday, October 03, 6:00 p.m.

Join us in person for a lecture by film director Tsai Ming-Liang followed by an audience Q&A.

Screenings of Tsai Ming-Liang’s films GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003), STRAY DOGS (2013), and DAYS (2020) will take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September.

Born in Malaysia in 1957, Tsai Ming-Liang is one of the most prominent film directors of the new cinema movement in Taiwan. He is known for long shots, elliptical narratives, painterly approaches to light and color, and poignant portrayals of urban and sexual alienation.

In 1994, Tsai’s film VIVE L’AMOUR was awarded the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, and this helped establish a place for him in the world of international film. In 2009, FACE became the first film to be included in the collection of the Louvre Museum’s program Le Louvre s’offre aux cinéastes. It has since become the benchmark for films venturing into the realm of art galleries. In recent years, Tsai has focused on installation art and his works have been well-received in Venice, Italy; Shanghai, China; and Nagoya, Japan.

At the invitation of the National Chiang Kai-Shek Cultural Center in 2011, Tsai returned to theater performance after a 27-year absence with three monodramas entitled Only You. Since 2012, he has been working on a long-term project filming actor Lee Kang-Sheng’s slow walk, collaborating with various cities and organizations. To date, Tsai has completed seven short works. His full-length feature STRAY DOGS (2013) was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 70th Venice Film Festival. In 2014, he presented the critically acclaimed theater work The Monk From Tang Dynasty at arts festivals in Brussels, Vienna, and Taipei. That same year, Tsai made history by bringing his work into the museum space with the solo video installation exhibition Stray Dogs at the Museum at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education.

This program is collaboratively presented by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Visiting Artists Program, the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC’s Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation’s Conversations at the Edge series. Presented in partnership with the Ministry of Culture-Taiwan Cultural Center in New York, the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago, Doc Films, and Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Programmed with support from J. Michael Eugenio. Presented as part of Tsai Ming-Liang’s US tour to Cambridge, Chicago, Washington DC, and New York City. Visit tsai2020.com for more information. 

Jessica Bardsley: Into the Canyon

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | September 22, 2022

Thursday, September 22, 6:00 p.m.

Join artist, scholar, and filmmaker Jessica Bardsley for a screening of her evocative landscapes and autofictions. Presented in partnership with the Video Data Bank.

In Jessica Bardsley’s evocative, award-winning films, landscapes serve as potent metaphors for emotional states. The humid darkness of underground caves, geological striations of the desert, and unfamiliar topographies of celestial bodies become sites to explore pain, fear, resilience, and a desire for transcendence. Bardsley draws her images from iconic films like THELMA & LOUISE and GIRL, INTERRUPTED as well as educational films, documentaries, and her own observational footage, weaving them into exquisite, shape-shifting essays that connect her own personal histories to broader cultural narratives. Bardsley presents a selection of works from the last decade, including THE BLAZING WORLD (2013), THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE EARTH (2018), GOODBYE THELMA (2019), INTO THE CANYON (2014-22), and LIFE WITHOUT DREAMS (2022).

Jessica Bardsley, 2013-22, USA, ca 75 minutes plus audience discussion
Digital video and 16mm
In English

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PROGRAM

THE BLAZING WORLD, 2013, USA, 19 minutes
THE BLAZING WORLD delves into the troubling relationship between Winona Ryder and the character she plays in the film GIRL, INTERRUPTED. Made up entirely of clips from existing films, this surprisingly personal video essay explores the possible links between depression and kleptomania.

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE EARTH, 2018, USA, 16 minutes
In THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE EARTH geology serves as both a metaphor for and a psychic container of women’s experiences of physical pain. Through archival footage and interviews, this film explores how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.

GOODBYE THELMA, 2019, USA, 14 minutes
GOODBYE THELMA synthesizes footage from the 1991 film THELMA & LOUISE with footage of the author’s own making to create a mysterious, and at times disturbing, exploration of traveling alone.

INTO THE CANYON, 2014-22, USA, 8 minutes
A group of women traverse a canyon on horseback.

LIFE WITHOUT DREAMS, 2022, USA, 14 minutes
LIFE WITHOUT DREAMS is set in the outer space of consciousness, where the surfaces of far out planetary bodies form the terrain for an exploration of 24/7 capitalism, insomnia, and the disappearance of darkness.

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ABOUT

Jessica Bardsley is an artist-scholar working across film, writing, and studio art. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University. Her films have screened within the U.S. and internationally at festivals like CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, European Media Art Festival, Flaherty NYC, the Montreal International Documentary Festival, and True/False Film Fest, as well as on the Criterion Channel. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25 FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Short Film at Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival, and numerous Film Study Center fellowships. Her research and writing have been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Announcing Fall 2022

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | August 23, 2022

Join us for the fall 2022 season of Conversations at the Edge!

The series returns to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Gene Siskel Film Center (164 North State Street) for in-person screenings with Jessica Bardsley (9/22), Tsai Ming-Liang (10/3), Marta Pajek (10/20), an animation program including Yoriko Mizushiri, Martina Scarpelli, Shoko Hara, Nadja Andrasev, Lénaïg Le Moigne, and Tal Kantor (10/27), Andy Warhol’s BATMAN DRACULA (11/3) and Tiffany Sia (12/1). Visit www.saic.edu/cate for season details.

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. 

Thank you! 2021-22 Season

Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | May 27, 2022

Thank you to everyone who made this year’s program possible!

We are so appreciative of the outstanding artists who shared their works, time, and ideas with us: Renée Green, Lynda Benglis, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Pom Bunsermvicha, Tulapop Saenjaroen, Nazli Dinçel, Meriem Bennani, Andy Slater, Dani ReStack, Sheilah ReStack, and Nick Briz, as well as the artists and scholars who conversed with them: Jordan Carter, Molly Donovan, Melika Bass, Emily Martin, Deborah Stratman, and Zach Vanes.

We’d also like to thank our wonderful partners: Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, The Disability Culture Activism Lab in the Department of Art Therapy and Counseling at SAIC, Access Living, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, The Society for Contemporary Art, Video Data Bank, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. Our programs would not have been possible without your support.

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

Make sure to follow us on social media (Conversations at the Edge is now on Instagram) for exciting news about our upcoming fall 2022 season!

Nick Briz

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

Dani and Sheilah ReStack

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | March 31, 2022

Thursday, March 31, 6:00 p.m.

Join Dani and Sheilah ReStack for the Chicago premiere of their feral domesticity trilogy. Presented in partnership with the 32nd Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival.

The videos of Dani and Sheilah ReStack are radical explorations of queer desire, parenthood, and creative community. Formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, the Restacks’ works are exhilarating montages of home, artmaking, sex, parenting, wounds, viscera, animals, gardens, and wild open spaces. The two will present the Chicago premiere of their feral domesticity trilogy, including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019), and the recently completed Future From Inside (2021), which brings together body doubles, animal synthesis, and expansive notions of family, all refracted through the beauty, cruelty, and promise of life.

2017–21, USA, ca. 58 minutes plus discussion
Digital video
In English
Videos courtesy of Video Data Bank

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PROGRAM

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, 2017, 26 minutes
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah ReStack collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.

Come Coyote, 2019, 8 minutes
“The second in a trilogy of films about desire and domesticity, Come Coyote examines issues around queer reproduction, intimacy, and motherhood. Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack capture in fleeting, diaristic images the tender and terrifying feelings they have around ushering new life into the world, conveyed with both humor and a powerful immediacy.” — Projections at NYFF, 2019 catalogue

 “A quixotic intimate portrait, Come Coyote portrays the reproductive challenges of same-sex couples with sensual poetry and humor, plus a pinch of despair.” — Ela Bittencourt, Hyperallergic, October 2019

Future From Inside, 2021, 19 minutes
Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack. The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work. The video utilizes body doubles, a continuing journey for answers and oracles, animal synthesis, queer desire, children and radical community to weave a fragmented future. This final offering of the trilogy does not offer answers to the personal and societal conflict, but continues the possibility of the feral domestic as a way to inhabit the space of living to yield surprising results.

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ABOUT

Dani and Sheilah ReStack have collaborated together since 2015. Their collaborative projects have shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Iceberg Projects, Chicago; Toronto International Film Festival; Images Festival, Toronto; Lyric Theater, Carrizozo, New Mexico Leslie-Lohman Project Space, New York; Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, Massachusetts; New York Film Festival; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. They have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and Visual Studies Workshop and have held residencies at The Headlands in Marin County and the MacDowell Colony. Both artists have established individual careers. Sheilah received her bachelor of fine arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and master of fine arts from Goldsmiths College, London. She is an associate professor and chair of studio art at Denison University. Dani received her master of fine arts in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and a master of fine arts in film/video from Bard College in 2009. She is an associate professor of drawing at Ohio State University.

Andy Slater

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | March 10, 2022

Thursday, March 10, 6:00 p.m.

Join artist Andy Slater for an evening of his evocative sound-based works. Presented in partnership with Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL) in SAIC’s Department of Art Therapy and Counseling, Access Living, and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in conjunction with the exhibition Crip*, on view from January 14 to March 12.  This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Andy Slater’s rich and evocative works combine distorted field recordings, alternative texts, and the singular rhythms and sonic colors of vintage accessible technologies. In a program designed especially for the Gene Siskel Film Center’s acoustic capabilities, Slater will present a selection of recent sound-based works inspired by research into Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination, a midcentury scientific theory hypothesizing that some blind people have the capacity to hear trans-dimensionally. Casting audiences into deep sonic drifts and waves of echoing repetitions, his compositions create the perception of ever morphing space, continually shifting between the sensual and psychic. Each work will be accompanied by an evocative set of alt texts, expansively building on ideas of access and accessibility. Slater will also discuss his recent work in virtual and augmented reality.

2019–22, USA, ca. 60 minutes plus discussion
Multiple formats
In English

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ABOUT

Andy Slater is a Chicago-based media artist, sound designer, and disability advocate. He is the founder of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists and a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young Sound Seekers program. Slater’s current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, alt text for sound and image, science fiction, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film and video games. He has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; transmediale, Berlin; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Critical Distance, Toronto; Gallery 400, Chicago; Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; Flux Factory, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and MOMENTA, Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists fellow, a 2022–23 Leonardo CripTech Incubator fellow, and was a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago. In 2020, the New York Times acknowledged his work in the article “28 Ways to Learn About Disability Culture.” Slater holds a master of arts in sound arts and industries from Northwestern University and a bachelor of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Meriem Bennani

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

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

Join artist Meriem Bennani for a screening of her works Party on the CAPS (2018), Guided Tour of a Spill (2021), and 2 Lizards (co-directed with Orian Barki, 2020). Presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, in conjunction with the exhibition Meriem Bennani, and the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

In her genre-bending and often absurdly funny videos, Rabat-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani fuses the languages of reality television, social media, and 3D animation to explore such weighty topics as biopolitics, virtuality, and globalism. In conjunction with the exhibition of her latest film Life on the CAPS at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Bennani presents a selection of related works. Party on the CAPS (2018) and Guided Tour of a Spill (2021) introduce viewers to a speculative future where teleportation has replaced air travel and a small island in the Atlantic is a creolized megacity populated by detained migrants. 2 Lizards (2020), her collaboration with filmmaker Orian Barki, chronicles the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded in real time. Originally released bi-weekly on Instagram, the series captures the surreality of lockdown and the growing social fissures exacerbated by systemic inequities and racism.

2018–2021, USA, Morocco, ca. 64 minutes plus discussion
Digital video
In Arabic, English, and French with English subtitles

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PROGRAM

Party on the CAPS, 2018, video, 26 minutes
Narrated by an animated crocodile, Meriem Bennani’s recent film Party on the CAPS is a docunarrative exploring the robust, technologically advanced, and totally hybridized culture of a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean called The CAPS. The film follows residents of a Moroccan neighborhood on the island–who, like all of the CAPS’ inhabitants, are refugees rejected by the United States—as they hang out, party, and otherwise go about their lives in this speculative society. Blending science-fiction and geopolitical realities, Party on the CAPS addresses immigration, surveillance, the real and the virtual, and globalized culture with humor and empathy. (Rhizome)

Guided Tour of a Spill, 2021, video, 15 minutes
Guided Tour of a Spill animates how the American Troopers snatch migrants from thin air and stash them on The CAPS. Meanwhile, the inhabitants have claimed their prison as their new homeland. Bennani’s work is gleefully fugitive in its own way, reveling in the space between animated and live, digital and analog, fantasy and documentary. And in her world, as in ours, the glitches and failures of tech produce new traumas alongside fresh freedoms. (Travis Diehl, Art in America)

2 Lizards, Co-directed with Orian Barki, 2020, video, 23 minutes
In spring 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown in New York City, artist Meriem Bennani and filmmaker Orian Barki took to social media: the pair collaborated on eight episodes of 2 Lizards, releasing a short video every few weeks on Instagram. This animated series chronicled the socially disrupted lives of the eponymous reptiles, voiced by the artists themselves, through a collaborative, diaristic approach that reflected the unfolding of the pandemic in real time. Using a combination of 3D animation and real footage shot, for example, in an empty Times Square, the series perfectly captures the range of emotions particular to lockdown, from dreamlike detachment to anxiety and, eventually, impassioned protest. 2 Lizards is an artistic time capsule that uses humor and poignant emotion to explore the societal fissures that formed around the pandemic, and its intersection with systemic racism. (Museum of Modern Art)

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ABOUT

Spanning video, sculpture, multimedia installation, drawing, and social media, Meriem Bennani’s often satiric and humorous works draw from globalized popular culture and Moroccan history. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at C L E A R I N G, Brooklyn; The Kitchen, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Art Dubai; MoMA PS1, New York; and SIGNAL, Brooklyn. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, New York; Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Geneva/Turin; Public Art Fund, New York; Shanghai Biennale; Jewish Museum, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; MANA Contemporary, New Jersey; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Bennani’s work is part of the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Kadist, Paris; and FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris.

Nazlı Dinçel

Posted by | otaper | Posted on | February 17, 2022

Thursday, February 17, 6:00 p.m.

Join artist Nazlı Dinçel for a screening of their provocative handmade films. Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Video Data Bank.

Nazlı Dinçel’s handmade films reflect on experiences of physical and cultural disruption, from intimate states of arousal to Dinçel’s own immigration from Turkey to the United States. By scratching, sewing, letter-punching, and hand-developing, they draw comparisons between the sensuous physicality of film and the body. Dinçel will present a selection of works, including Between Relating and Use (2018), Shape of a Surface (2017), Solitary Acts (4, 5, 6) (2015), and Instructions on How to Make a Film (2018), along with the rarely screened video Untitled (2016), and discuss their practice. 

2015–18, USA, Turkey, Argentina, ca 66 minutes plus discussion
16mm and digital video
In English

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PROGRAM

Between Relating and Use, 2018, 16mm, 9 minutes
Borrowing words from Laura Mark’s “Transnational Object” and DW Winnicott’s “Transitional Object”, this film is an attempt to ethically make work in a foreign land. Transitioning from assuming the position of an ethnographer, we turn and explore inwards – on how we use our lovers.

Shape of a Surface, 2017, 16mm, 9 minutes
The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.

Solitary Acts #4, 2015, 16mm, 8 minutes
The filmmaker films herself masturbate the object of debate. She hears others claim her body, her habits: those in her conservative surroundings as a child. The viewer claims her as well, by watching her in this private act. She is 9 years old, then 12. She observes popular icons, dismissing the agency of their body: with some teenage angst, denies climax to everyone else but herself.

Solitary Acts #5, 2015, 15mm, 5.5 minutes
The filmmaker films herself practice kissing with a mirror. She recalls teenage memories of overconsumption, confusing oral fixations (kissing and eating). She ends up eating the carrot she is masturbating with, and she feels a sense of cannibalism. The components of the background of the scene are broken down and filmed in extreme closeups. These wave and play with one another: when text over-consumes the image it transforms into the backdrop fabric where the filmmaker physically attaches the film together with fishing line.

Solitary Acts #6, 2015, 16mm, 11 minutes
This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. The aborted child survives and becomes her lover. Her subject is filmed in a private act, complicating what could be an act of the solitary. There are three parts in the film. First is a recount of the child’s earliest sexual memory, similar to the filmmaker’s in Solitary Acts #4. The text is hammered on the film with letter punches. Second is a letter written to the filmmaker from her subject, being read by the filmmaker. The image is punched out with a leather puncher and carefully replaced into black leader with tweezers. A pop song from 2009 is used, the one the filmmaker heard while driving in the taxi from her abortion. Third is a letter that the filmmaker wrote, being read by the subject. In this third part the audio is broken apart and the letter is reversed, mimicking the reverse masturbation (the image).

Untitled, 2016, video, 12 minutes

Instructions on How to Make a Film, 2018, 16mm, 13 minutes
Shot at the Film Farm in Mt. Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farm land. Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.

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ABOUT

Born in Ankara, Turkey, the artist and filmmaker Nazlı Dinçel currently resides in Milwaukee. While they are known for their films, they work across a number of mediums, drawing inspiration from Turk­ish weaving and rug making. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis,  International Film Festival Rotterdam, Hong Kong International Film Festival, and Buenos Aires International Film Festival, among many others. In addition to their art practice, Dinçel is building an artist-run film laboratory, part of a global net­work of collectives dedicated to exploring the possibilities of analog filmmaking in the wake of the photochemical film industry’s collapse.

Announcing Spring 2022

Posted by | ialber | Posted on | February 5, 2022

Join us for the spring 2022 season of Conversations at the Edge!

The series returns to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Gene Siskel Film Center (164 North State Street) for in-person screenings, performances, and presentations with Nazli Dincel (Feb 17),  Meriem Bennani (Mar 10),  Andy Slater (Mar 31), Dani and Sheilah ReStack (Apr 14), and Nick Briz  (Apr 14). Visit www.saic.edu/cate for season details.

Thanks to our partners Video Data Bank, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts and the University of Chicago, Gallery 400, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the Gene Siskel Film Center.

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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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