. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

On Martine Syms

This week I am delighted to write about Los Angeles-based ‘conceptual entrepreneur’ Martine Syms! Syms explores identity and the ways it is constructed, particularly blackness and black identity–through popular and everyday culture.  Martine Syms’s highly interdisciplinary and prolific practice explores the requirements and motives of individual and collective identities in contemporary Western society. Her work often interprets […]

November 12-Martine Syms: The Unreliable Narrator

Thursday, November 12 | This week Los Angeles based ‘conceptual entrepreneur’ Martine Syms will join us for a screening and discussion!  The interdisciplinary work of Los Angeles–based “conceptual entrepreneur” Martine Syms (BFA 2007) takes shape through websites, essays, bibliographies, and videos to explore the ways individual and social identities are formed. Incisive and sharp, she has addressed Afrofuturism, […]

April 17 – Thom Andersen: Reconversão

Thursday, April 17 | Tom Andersen in person! A master of the essay film, Thom Andersen turns his attention to the work of the Pritzker Prize–winning Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Considering built, unrealized, and abandoned projects and using a stop-motion technique that emphasizes the temporal dimension of architecture, Reconversão (2012) regards buildings not as static objects but living things, subject […]

April 10 – Everything is Terrible! Doggie Woggiez and More

Thursday, April 10 | Commodore Gilgamesh and Ghoul Skool in person! “If everything is terrible, then nothing is” is the motto of this filmmaking collective, whose pseudonym-loving members make rapid-fire mash-ups from VHS tapes found in thrift stores—forgotten children’s shows, religious sermons, no-budget monster movies—to explore the weirdest corners of the American psyche. Leaving little time for […]