. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

An Evening with Angelo Madsen Minax

Thursday, October 3, 6:00 p.m. Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank. Minax presents a second program of his works at the Leather Archives and Museum on Saturday, October 5. Exhilarating in their emotional and conceptual depth, the films of multidisciplinary artist Angelo Madsen Minax explore queer and trans desire, chosen and biological kinships, landscape, […]

Shu Lea Cheang: Fresh Kill

Thursday, April 11, 6:00 p.m “Shu Lea Cheang’s audacious directorial debut is a lethal comedy swimming through a torrent of toxic multinational treachery.” —Lawrence Chua, BOMB Magazine Renowned media artist Shu Lea Cheang presents her groundbreaking debut feature, a cyberfeminist eco-thriller, newly restored for its 30th anniversary. Partners Shareen (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire (Erin McMurtry) […]

Shu Lea Cheang: UKI

Wednesday, April 10, 6:00 p.m. In her latest feature, pioneering media artist Shu Lea Cheang mixes 3D animation and live action to create an exhilaratingly queer science-fiction epic of corporate surveillance, contagion, sex, and biotechnology. Residents of a city beset by a viral epidemic discover that the pharmaceutical firm GENOM has been harvesting data about […]

Elisabeth Subrin: Maria Schneider, 1983 and Shulie

Thursday, March 21, 6:00 p.m. In her acclaimed “speculative biographies,” filmmaker and SAIC alum Elisabeth Subrin (MFA 1995) explores the absences and erasures of women’s lives from the historic record. She presents two works, produced 26 years apart, that use reenactment to express the ways we continue to live with, in Subrin’s words, “the residues […]

The Blue Description Project

Thursday, February 15, 6:00 p.m. In 1993, the British artist Derek Jarman released Blue, an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite being referred to as a feature film, Blue never existed exclusively in one medium. It was screened in theaters, simulcast […]

Lawrence Andrews: mythicPotentialities

Thursday, October 12, 6:00 p.m. Enthralling in form and vision, Lawrence Andrews’ works are kaleidoscopic explorations of Blackness through mass media and popular culture. In the genre-defying imageless video mythicPotentialities (2019), Andrews examines the murder of Emmett Till, the trial that followed, and the ways these events have been mediated through artistic and mass media. Focusing on […]

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Thursday, February 16, 6:00 p.m. “The films and videos of Los Ingrávidos are signed in solidarity under a collective banner… fashioned together in love and outrage.” – Stephen Broomer, CinemaScope “In its mode of organization, intersectional approach, and formal characteristics, [Los Ingrávidos] is one of the most singular contemporary Latin American film collectives.” – Raquel Schefer, Jump […]

Electric Visions: Chicago’s Groundbreaking Video and Computer Art

Thursday, February 09, 6:00 p.m. “When I think of computer art I think of Chicago.” – Gene Youngblood, Send Magazine, 1983 In the 1970s and 80s, Chicago was home to a community of video artists and engineers—many of them women—whose groundbreaking experiments with analogue and digital computers produced a body of astonishingly rich and influential work. This […]

Announcing Spring 2023

Join us for the spring 2023 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 screenings and artist appearances, including Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (2/16), Deborah Stratman (3/30), Claudia Hart (4/6), Marwa Arsanios (4/19 and 4/20), Apichatpong […]

Thank you! Fall 2023

Thank you to everyone who made this season possible! We are so appreciative of the amazing artists who shared their works, time, and ideas with us: Jessica Bardsley, Tsai Ming-Liang, Marta Pajek, Yoriko Mizushiri, Martina Scarpelli, Shoko Hara, Nadja Andrasev, Lénaïg Le Moigne, and Tal Kantor, and Tiffany Sia as well as the artists and […]

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