Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of June 28th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of June 28th

It's in the Game '17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Protection (2017) by Sondra Perry
Hammer Museum/Online (Eventbrite)
June 30, 2020@5pm PDT/Free
Screening and Q+A

Sondra Perry's twin brother Sandy was an NCAA Basketball player. A version of him appeared in a videogame without his knowledge or consent. A meditation on identity, technology and "ownership," Perry's It's in the Game '17 breaks down flat digital space, playing with its dimensionality and making one question their understanding of perspective. The film moves between different visual themes including family photos of the twins growing up while three dimensional, chroma-key blue artifacts float in the foreground. Another theme involves cell-phone video of the twins as they encounter the versions of history displayed at The Met and The British Museum. The piece reminds that the co-opting of images and identities isn't a new phenomenon but that the digital space has only worked to confuse and subvert ideas of ownership, self, subject and object: everything and everyone can be chroma-keyed out or photoshopped on a whim, or, more frighteningly, with exacting purpose. It's impossible to distill this piece into its many layers and visions, it is a piece of contemporary work that symbolizes so much of the digital meets physical moment, of the boundaries and infiniteness that are exhilarating and suffocating all with a slight sense of humor. I really love this one, check it out!

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Strain Andromeda The (1992) by Anne McGuire
Lux /Screening Room (Eventbrite)
July 2, 2020@6pm BST/Free
Screening via link for 48hrs prior to Q+A

London based Lux is a non-profit that "supports and promotes artists' moving image practices and the ideas that surround them." (They also happened to be a sponsor of the 2019 Oberhausen Seminar that I was lucky enough to be a part of). Their response to Covid-19 has been the Screening Room series which will kick off this week with Anne McGuire's Strain Andromeda The. The film takes Robert Wise's 1971 film adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, a film whose plot revolves fittingly around a deadly alien contagion that nearly wipes out a small town in New Mexico, and reverses it via her signature "disaster deconstruction" technique. McGuire's version begins with the last shot and slowly inches backward-- not in reverse but in measured moments: answers to questions precede the questions, consequences come before actions. Other online offerings of screening and events via Lux are also worth noting be sure to explore! 

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Salacia (2019) by Tourmaline
MoMA/Artist Project Online
June 26@8pm-July 6, 2020
Thanks @oumaaaa_for link!

As Tourmaline mentions in the introduction to this screening, Salacia deals in a few different histories of New York City including the story of black trans sex worker Mary Jones who was born in 1803 and later imprisoned at Sing Sing for larceny, to the story of Seneca Village, a community of black landowners in the mid-19th Century wiped out by the fear of local politicians: the village was taken via eminent domain for the building of Central Park. The film collapses histories, a culmination of the "freedom dreams" of many, an assertion of existence, and perhaps reclamation, ringing out in the final, haunting repeated line (no spoilers, watch it). The surrealistic portrait is shot on 16mm, the grainy beauty of the film is shown through split-screen images and overlays that allow for different realities to co-exist, a changing of perspective that further destabilizes memory/history/place/possession. In the film's intro, Tourmaline reminds that New York City was built by the free labor of prisoners and, like the other histories present in the film, watchers are reminded of the power embodied in these invisible ghosts of the city brought to life in this powerful, evocative, life-affirming film.

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National Anthem (2019) by Kota Ezawa
Whitney Museum of American Art/Whitney Screens
July 3@7pm-July 5, 2020@10pm EDT

Ezawa's watercolor animation looks like it might float off the paper that it is so delicately crafted upon, a fitting embodiment of an event that is both heavy and uplifting. The film uses broadcast images of San Francisco 49er's Colin Kapernick as he knelt during the pre-game National Anthem in 2016, an act in response to racial inequality and the ongoing injustices enacted upon black people and people of color by white law enforcement. His action caused massive outrage and career upheaval, responses that are further proof of the structures of power the nation has been trapped within. Ezawa's work, as in previous pieces, looks at how events are represented through media often by using things like existing news footage or Hollywood scenes and transforming them into a more graphical form, questioning the truth and essence in forms of representation. Though presented digitally, the handmade nature of the watercolors is full, a human connection emerges from the images along with a reminder that real people are behind all sorts of creativity and progression but also a reminder that real people can be behind all sorts of destruction and pain.

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of June 21st

Top Picks for Art Online Week of June 21st

DAMELO TODO (Give Me Everything) (2010-2011) by Wu Tsang

Whitney Museum of American Art/Whitney Screens

June 26, 2020@7pm/Free
"This screening will present the film in its entirety. The live-stream will remain on Vimeo until Sunday, June 28 at 10 pm EDT."

I do not know much about the work of 2018 MacArthur Award Winner Wu Tsang but, anyone that collaborates with the force that is Fred Moten (who Ja'Tovia Gary quoted in a recent Q&A as saying "upward mobility means getting closer to the people who want to kill you") is worth learning more about. The Whitney continues it's Friday online screening with Tsang's DAMELO TODO (Give Me Everything). It isn't entirely clear to me the way the project will be presented as it seems the piece is intended to be screened in an installation setting-- a remake of a space similar to the Silver Platter a Latinx queer bar in L.A. where much of the film takes place, the film displayed on the tv behind the counter. The film itself lives in the hybrid space of doc and narrative mixing together interviews with "Alexis Giraldo, a transgender woman who was incarcerated in an all-male facility" with a short story penned by Raquel Gutierrez about a Salvadoran civil war refugee who discovers a renewed sense of life and justice on the stage of the Californian bar. Stage lights shine bright with belonging, a sense of self emerges. The fact that Tsang comes from the activist world and not the film world is of note as it seems like her work inhabits a sense of intimacy and immediacy, the body politic as it naturally springs forth from simply living. Excited to see this one! 

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Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) by Arthur Jafa
Screening Online for 48hrs
Multiple Museum Venues Online 
Starts on June 26, 2020@2pm
Two round table panel discussions will take place June 27&28@2pm

I have been wanting to see Love Is the Message forever after seeing a bootleg of the film's installation on youtube and having the film's soundtrack (Kanye's Ultralight Beam) glide into my playlists with reverence reminiscent of an exhausted modern prayer. Jafa began his work as a photographer most notably working as DP on Julie Dash's seminal film Daughters of the Dust (1991). He has since gone on to become a force in the art film world (Winner of the Golden Lion) and music video world (Solange, Cranes In The Sky) crafting a signature montage of black American moving image. This particular film uses a series of archival materials, youtube clips and other images shot by Jafa, a comment on the making of black identity through media. Every cut Jafa makes resonates with meaning, his work as an editor spearheading new, lyrical semiotics. The revolution is being televised, how will these histories be remembered? Do. Not. Miss. This. Film.

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Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988) by Tony Cokes

Hammer Museum & the Dia Arts Foundation

June 25@9am-June 28@6pm/Free
(I added this after the initial post because I just watched it and it blew my mind.)

The piece alternates text and images, words from Marxists to Pop Musicians (Guy Debord, Barbara Kruger, Martin Gore, and Morrissey), images from newsreels, and documentary footage of riots in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Newark NJ in the 1960s. The soundtrack is by Skinny Puppy. The look of the film is a black & white VHS texture, interlacing jumbled, the use of slow-motion is jagged and arresting. The anti-capitalist creeds scream against a stark black background laying bare the root of all acts of rioting, pointing out the ways in which people are continually subjugated by the dollar and rebel accordingly. Watch this film loudly in all of its gritty punk beauty and class critique truth bombing. I love this piece. 

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LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996) by Bruce Conner
Paula Cooper Gallery & Camden Art Centre, Online
June 22-29, 2020/Free

Bruce Conner, another artist whose work I am not familiar with, will have his piece LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS screen online via Paula Cooper Gallery. Conner's career seems to span genre and medium everything from intricate, obsessive drawings , crude collages/assemblages (notes of Rauschenberg) and experimental films often stitched together from archival materials like newsreels. Conner is also credited with using pop music in his films, predating the music video. This particular film lies outside of all of these genres, it is more of an experimental meditation/documentary filmed on 16mm by the artist while in Mexico. Reflections, shapes and colors layer atop one another, blurry movements become their own objects. It is sculptural filmmaking (he was friends with Stan Brakhage) made whole by the palpitations of jazz minimalist Terry Riley. Watch this on a large screen with good speakers.

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Redoubt (2019) by Matthew Barney
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Film Screening
Rentable in the US via Grasshopper Film for 24hrs
June 25, 2020@7pm/$12
(50% of the Revenue will support Guggenheim programming initiatives)

The thing that Björk's ex does best is elevating the mundane to the mythic and demoting the mythic to the mundane. His work often makes me uncomfortable and that was before I knew of his history as a high school footballer. And as a model. And almost a plastic surgeon. I don't know much about his new film other than it looks like a hunt through a snowy white landscape dotted with the bloodstains of the fallen. Creation and destruction balance precariously, steeped in tradition while survival and expression engage in a dance of wills. The characters play in deliberate movement, the gestalt in every step is choreographed intention. Barney's work is generally hit or miss for me but his conceptual visions tend to be unique regardless of whether I become sickened by vaseline heaps or sleepy from the meditative wake of boats against the placid sea. His work is also often hard to physically access so it is worth noting when there is a possibility for the art inclined (aka privileged) masses to behold his strange, creepy markings. Reviews mention this is one of his more watchable films...but keep in mind that that is relative.

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com

Party on the CAPS By Meriem Bennani

A cartoon crocodile/cereal box icon leads watchers through a fictional US territory, a future island in the Atlantic where rejected migrants are teleported into a smash-up of bodies and cultures: this is Meriem Bennani's Party on the CAPS, a sci-fi-docu-narrative that imagines the ugliness and the beauty that can spawn when things are taken apart and put back together. Bennani's work is a virtual palimpsest, a metaphysical meets artificial world laying upon a real one, identities and emotions bubble from the humanity behind the pixels, a place where "having a body is never taken for granted." 

The "dislocated population" of the CAPS are "reassembled with violence" mirroring the realities of the present that many are forced to deal with when encountering borders, barriers and perceived difference. In the post-screening Q&A presented by Rhizome online in May, Bennani spoke of the way that diaspora is viewed as an anomaly when it isn't (a concept she attributes to a Paris-based philosopher-- whose name I could not catch in the stream!), pretending there is a duality forces a binary, an ongoing, manufactured conflict used to distract, assimilate and disperse.

Stylistically, the film feels like a social media feed, content connects and flickers -- images, histories, futures, music, fantasy user interfaces, CGI, "real" viral memes-- flow into a funnel of singular experience. A birthday party in a Morroccan enclave within the CAPS features Bennani's actual family happily living in their familiar yet futuristic world. Augmentation/enhancement through technology is exaggerated just slightly beyond present-day reality, poking at the wobbly lines of time, space and genre as needs and desires morph into each other beyond recognition. Bennani's signature smirk is evident throughout, a tone that feels totally appropriate in the face of life's growing excess and insanity.

Even though this piece is supposed to be seen as a part of a larger installation, Bennani said the single-channel version of the film is a more democratic viewing experience, something she continues to play with during pandemic isolation in her most recent Instagram collaboration.



2 Lizards is a series of micro-shorts made by Bennani and Orian Barki, a look at the lockdown lives of two lizards living in the confines of New York City during peak Covid-19. The series is another fictionalized documentary, a hybrid of real-world images and animation channeling a pervasive digital existence. The animated, anthropomorphic animals make the pieces feel like modern-day fables while also obscuring the tendency to label. Feelings and moods provoked by unending stimulus and news cycles highlight the wonder and anxiety that normally buzzes through the neurotic privilege of the city, states that are now heightened by mortal urgency.

Curator/artist Aria Dean, who facilitated the Q&A online for Party on the CAPS, spoke of the "defamiliarizing tactic" that Bennai's work takes on, Bennani responded with how documentary and sci-fi are both "world building...every choice becomes an intention, nothing is a given" which makes art "symbolic...charged with history and charged with politics." Both Party on the CAPS and 2 Lizards skew the reality of a skewed reality and do so in a way that itches with newness under eerie, funny, existential skin. There is always hope clinging to absurdism and there is always-- as Bennani said, "a third possibility for thriving"--, a revolution, clinging to the very best art.

May 20, 2020
Party on the CAPS, Livestream/Single Channel and Q&A
Via Rhizome (New Museum)
Recorded Q&A here

2 Lizards streaming via Instagram