Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 18th

 Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 18th

Combahee Experimental: Black Women's Experimental Filmmaking: The Black Surreal

Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University / Zoom webinar

October 22, 2020 / 6pm ET / free w/registration

This event is part of a series that celebrates the contributions of Black women to contemporary visual culture, a series birthed from a 2018 Guggenheim conference, Loophole of Retreat, as part of Simone Leigh's Hugo Boss exhibition of the same name. On October 22, the curators of the series, Leigh (who was recently announced as representing the US at the next Venice Biennale) and Tina Campt (a Black feminist theorist of visual and contemporary art whose forthcoming book is titled The New Black Gaze) will be in conversation with filmmakers Nuotama Bodomo and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich following an online screening of a selection of their films. Films included in the lineup are Bodomo's critically acclaimed Afro-futurist, speculative docu-fiction dream Afronauts (2014) and Hunt-Ehrlich's surreal documentary Spit on the Broom (2019) about the history of the United Order of Tents, a secret society of African American Women founded in 1867. The amount of awe, wonder and brilliance emanating from this line-up of participants is beyond inspiring- don't miss this. 

↔

Karen Feldman: Angel on Your Shoulder: Representations of Modern Conscience

Arts + Design Thursdays, UC Berkeley/ Zoom webinar

October 22, 2020 / 12-1 PT / free w/registration

Arts + Design Thursdays at UC Berkeley is a public lecture series hosted online that features talks across disciplines, amplifying the work of the university's professor and other Bay Area organizations. This particular lecture stood out to me because I have asked myself this question on more than one occasion: Does Facebook have a conscience? Throughout human history the notion of conscience has floated in the collective conscious-- visually and narratively shape-shifting in an ever-evolving understanding through time. Prof. Karen Feldman, whose wide-ranging background focuses on the ways in which political power manifests in society, will "explore the rhetoric of conscience, and how it was conceptualized and visualized through the ages."

↔

Yes, there will be singing (2020) by Diana Thater 

David Zwirner / online exhibition

October 14-November 28, 2020 / 24hours a day / free

There are two things I don't think I love more in the world than Bertolt Brecht and whales. It's true. Which is why when this exhibition came on my radar I had to do a quick double-take. Diana Thater's online experience is a livestream that features a series of security cameras positioned in a 360degree circle in a space bathed in a shifting color spectrum. The cameras flit between feeds in a disorienting fashion as the sounds of "Whale 52," a real-life whale of mythic proportions whose unique song beams at 52 Hertz-- a frequency outside of the "normal" whale song range--, shiver through the space. Has he been deafened by sonar? Can the other whales perceive his sound? Is he floating lonely in the light-dappled ocean? Whale 52's rumblings play in contrast to the buoyant, high pitched whirs of the songs of other whales, he is alone and adrift like all of us currently in isolation yet we are all invisibly connected through moments like this exhibition. 

↔

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