October 31 – Shengze Zhu: Present.Perfect.
Shengze Zhu in person Award-winning filmmaker Shengze Zhu (MFA 2017) is celebrated for her incisive portraits of everyday life in China. Her latest film, Present.Perfect., spotlights the country’s explosive livestreaming phenomenon. Collaged from more than 800 hours of footage from “anchors” who share their lives with a virtual community, the film eschews the medium’s stars to […]
October 17 – Narcisa Hirsch: Contact Zones
Curator Federico Windhausen in person and Narcisa Hirsch via Skype A pivotal figure in Latin American experimental cinema, Narcisa Hirsch is renowned for her striking explorations of the body, agency, and desire. Emigrating from Germany to Argentina in the 1920s, Hirsch first took up artistic practice through painting, then shifted to performances and happenings before […]
March 7 – On Watching Men
Curator Rachael Rakes in person Featuring works by Chick Strand, Tracey Moffatt, Yael Bartana and Jumana Manna, this program explores the subtleties of power relations and gender dynamics in observational film and media art. The artists turn their cameras on men, addressing and reversing conventional hierarchies, while also placing various manifestations of masculinity under experimental, […]
On Text of Light and Films by László Moholy-Nagy
This week, we welcome back graduate student, Mev Luna, to conclude our Fall 2016 season with some thoughts on László Moholy-Nagy’s films and experimental music group, Text of Light. Line. Movement. Composition. Transparency. Layered forms. All of these adjectives can be applied to the large breadth of work by László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), as seen in […]
Thursday, December 1 – Text of Light and films by László Moholy-Nagy
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium (please use Modern Wing entrance, 159 E. Monroe Street) FREE, registration required. Register here. Film and photography played central roles in the work of pioneering artist and designer László Moholy-Nagy, who experimented with light, abstraction, and staccato montage throughout his career. For this program, the improvisational group Text of […]
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, […]
On Heinz Emigholz
This week I am thrilled to welcome SAIC student Sidney Tilghman to the blog! Sidney highlights the ways Heinz Emigholz’s film The Airstrip explores modernity through a wide array of structures ranging from airports to shopping malls from Wrocław, Poland to Mexico City, Mexico. Like many of Heinz Emigholz’s films, The Airstrip (2013) unspools in a specific juncture of time and […]
October 29-Heinz Emigholz: The Airstrip
Thursday, October 29 | This week German director Heinz Emigholz joins us for a screening of The Airstrip and a discussion! German director Heinz Emigholz is renowned for a series of films on the buildings of Louis Sullivan, Adolf Loos, and Rudolf Schindler. With The Airstrip (2013), he weaves architectural study into a wide-ranging examination of the […]
On Louis Henderson
Tomorrow English filmmaker Louis Henderson will join us for his first Chicago appearance! Video Data Bank‘s Lindsay Bosch blogs about Henderson’s references to the Internet and computing in his complex meditations on neo-colonalism and contemporary Ghana. Most of video art I watch, I watch on my laptop. I dream of creating a perfect screening space—uninterrupted hours, big […]
October 8- Louis Henderson: Melts Into Air
Thursday, October 8 | Paris-based filmmaker Louis Henderson in person! In his first Chicago appearance, award-winning director Louis Henderson presents a pair of films on the networked links between colonialism, computing, and capitalism in contemporary Ghana. In Lettres du Voyant (2013), a series of mysterious letters describe the practice of “Sakawa”—e-scams fortified by Western African religious rituals—and the possibilities […]
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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.
