Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of December 6th

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of December 6th

David Humphrey Book Launch/Panel Discussion

Fredericks & Freiser / zoom book launch + panel discussion

December 8, 2020 / 5pm EST / free w/registration

So, two years ago I saw these two images online. One, a glassy-eyed poodle staring with a concerning deadness against a frenzy of color and two, a tiger who either has a rear jutting out onto a separate canvas, looking over its shoulder with the audaciousness of a hungry model...or an image of a tiger with a canvas of abstract orange forms abutting it. I know nothing about the artist but, the two images haunted me so when this event popped up on instagram the recognition was exciting! I learned that the artist is David Humphrey, an American neo surrealist and art critic who came of artistic age in the 70s postmodernist movement. This event is a launch of the first collection of monographs of the artist's work spanning his 40-year career. There is something uncanny yet funny in his paintings that speaks deeply to me, like a serious question-- asked with a smirk-- about what one believes and what one believes to be real. 

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A Discussion of Milford Graves Full Mantis With Director Jake Meginsky

Kingsessing Library + Ars Nova Workshop / zoom discussion

December 10, 2020 / 6pm ET / free/registration recommended

Mondays With Milford

Institute of Contemporary At, University of Pennsylvania + Ars Nova Worskshop / online screenings

Sept. 28- January 18, 2020, biweekly / 6pm ET / free

Milford Graves is a drummer, visual artist, herbalist, acupuncturist, martial artist, professor and many, many other things all poured into the form of a man. The poetic documentary portrait Full Mantis captures the intense aura of Graves and his body of work, a fully focused film that bursts through to some other cosmic plane of understanding/being. Unlike many nonfiction films about artists that tend to falter through either lack of vision or inability to translate their subjects, this film is a stellar embodiment of the man-- really wonder how the director got to this place of expression? This discussion will be with director Jake Maginsky through the Kingsessing Library of Philadelphia. Full Mantis should be available through Kanopy, a streaming service that many libraries provide to patrons free of charge-- ask your local library! 

 A Mind Body Deal (an art exhibit by Graves) is currently on display at the ICA in Philly and, in conjunction with the exhibit, there has been an ongoing virtual screening series. Every other Monday a selection of films from the Milford Graves archives, or some other contextualizing media, are screened online remaining available each week until the next showing. This week, December 7, features Encounters in Japan, a series of films centering on Graves' collaborations with performance artist Min Tanaka. 

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Feminist International: How to Change Everything 

International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs + Verso Books/ zoom lecture

December 11, 2020 / 12pm PST / free w/registration

This discussion brings together Judith Butler (UC Berkeley), Susana Draper (Princeton), Verónica Gago (UNSAM; Ni Una Menos; UBA), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (CUNY Graduate Center), and moderator Natalia Brizuela (UC Berkeley) to discuss Gago's book, Feminist International. The book "draws on the author’s rich experience with radical movements to enter into ongoing debates in feminist and Marxist theory: from social reproduction and domestic work to the intertwining of financial and gender violence, as well as controversies surrounding the neo-extractivist model of development, the possibilities and limits of left populism, and the ever-vexed nexus of gender-race-class." Basically, Gago wants to, as the subtitle suggests, change everything and this group of thinkers is the perfect ensemble to rethink and upend the very notions of power & gender. 

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of November 29th

  Top Picks for Art Online Week of November 29th

Perspectives: Arthur Gamedze and Another Time Ensemble

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center / livestream

Dec. 2, 2020 / 12pm ET / free

Arthur Gamedze is a South African drummer and purveyor of "Astral Jazz," akin to the legendary free & spiritual jazz movements of the 60s (think Coltrane-- John & Alice). Another Time Ensemble features a lineup of improvisers from the city of Cario, where this rooftop performance will be taking place, a city of histories threaded together to form a past of mythic proportions. The multitude of roots buried deep within the city inspires this performance as compositions from Gamedze, and possibly poetry or other hints from other times, will weave together in a live-streamed experience of now. 

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Art and Empathy: Community Care Through Art 

Brooklyn Musuem / online talk + creation via zoom 

Dec. 3, 2020 / 2-3:30 ET / free w/registration

Yes! An art therapy session for all! I personally broke out some scissors and crayons recently out of a need for escape (and possibly control?); there is definitely value in taking your mind to another place these days....This event brings together art therapist Sarah Pousty, museum educator Dalila Scruggs, and social work intern Lula Zeray to provide a moment of self-care, reflection and coming together. A piece of art will be explored in depth followed by the opportunity to make art of one's own. This event sounds like the one big creative, collective exhale the world could use right now. 

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Alex Ross: Wagner & Hollywood

Hammer Museum + the UCLA Departments of Comparative Literature and Musicology / online talk

Dec. 3, 2020 / 5pm PST / free w/RSVP

Author and longtime New Yorker Music Critic, Alex Ross, has a new book out Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. A 2020 New York Times Notable Book, it focuses on Richard Wagner, the highly influential 19th Century German composer who shaped so many cultural voices: painters, writers, movements-- and even film. Wagner's "leitmotif" model in his operas (think Star Wars: a recurring theme for each character or place or theme) went on to become the basis for the first film scores. Unfortunately, Wagner's legacy is also associated with another type of film, that of Nazi propaganda thanks to Hitler's love of Wagner's intense, forceful expressions..unsure where this talk will go but hopefully it will go here:

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of November 22nd

I need to skip this week! I don't have COVID...but I do have strep throat! Which is terrifying because I vigilantly wear a mask and wash my hands and use anti-bacterial everything: Please Stay Home. 

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of November 15th

 Top Picks for Art Online Week of November 15th

 

Talk: Nick Cave and Friends

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago / online zoom talk + fb live

November 17, 2020 / 12pm CT / free w/registration 

Has anyone seen Nick Cave's current exhibit down at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas? I've been weighing the COVID risk weekly as I deeply want to see this exhibit but am trying to be hella responsible ...sigh...Either way, I always find Cave's work to be more than moving, from his video installations, to dance performances, to his intricately conceived textile machinations-- he can do it all-- each work moving outward into an ecstatic, emotional vibration. I love Cave's work even more since learning that he went to high school in the city I currently live in in Missouri- go Kewpies? Yes. I said Kewpies. This talk will feature Cave, dancer Damita Jo Freeman, musician Nona Hendryx, and publisher Linda Johnson Rice-- each equally as prolific and awe-inspiring in their own right!-- as they talk about Cave's inspiration and key cultural turning points "from Soul Train to Ebony."  

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Black Music in America: 16mm screening 

Fresh Produce w/Greg Hamilton / fb live

November 18, 2020 / 9-9:45pm CT / free

Deep from the basement of Greg Hamilton, another 16mm screening will run its reels for all to enjoy! This time, the film will be the rare 25 minute documentary Black Music in America featuring jazz and blues performances from such greats as Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson and Sly & the Family Stone (and many others!). This particular film is soon to leave Greg's unique library so catch it while you can! We're all lucky that this cinephile is giving all of us who don't have a projector on hand a chance to share in the wonder and grainy beauty of cinema together. xox

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True Crime and the Case for Abolition Documentary with Pooja Rangan and Brett Story

University of Pennsylvania, School of Arts & Sciences / online colloquium via zoom 

November 18, 2020 / 12-1 pm ET / free 

The wildly popular True Crime documentary is a genre that I find problematic...but naturally tend to enjoy due to its inherent narrative thrill. As an audience we lust after the misfortune of others, seeking justice, resolution, some sense of shared normalcy or ethics while also hoping to be wildly entertained...and it's only been on the rise thanks to streaming platforms that seem to see it as easy/cheap content. This lecture will discuss the relationship between true crime and documentary, looking for a future in which these films can be more than lurid storytelling as the event notes: "We discuss the collaboration between true crime and documentary, the socio-legal construction of criminality, and the false promises of reform, to argue for an abolition documentary that relinquishes, once and for all, its investments in guilt, innocence, and the category of crime." Side note: I've seen Pooja Rangan speak before and she was phenomenal and Brett Story's most recent film, The Hottest August, made my 2020 Top Ten List: don't miss this! 

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One Day Geology Bootcamp

Rutgers- NASA ENIGMA / virtual course

November 19, 2020 / 10am-2:15pm / free w/registration

Nov 19th Geology Bootcamp Rutgers

The co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere is the focus of this online course brought to you by Rutgers University & NASA's joint ENIGMA (Evolution of Nanomachines In Geospheres and Microbial Ancestors) team aimed at promoting and researching the field of astrobiology. Some topics that will be discussed in this event include the development of the Earth's crust, how rocks are dated, and the origin of minerals & their cycles through geologic time. It will also explain to me what "Isotopic Fractionation Work" is. Even though the event is being hosted by space bio-geo-logists (or something?), it is geared at an undergraduate level so don't be intimidated.

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In Performance: Leila Josefowicz + George Condo. Internal Riot

Hauser & Wirth / online music performance

November 20, 2020 / 2pm EST / free w/registration

George Condo's paintings freak me out. As does the fact that he dated an Olsen twin. Regardless, his paintings evoke something bulbous and evil--  like geometrically possessed Picassos-- that feel at home with equally as irksome Carroll Dunham or maybe corporeal Philip Guston's? However, the unease about them is somewhat fitting to the times I guess. His current show, Internal Riot, is on display at Hauser & Wirth and, in conjunction with the exhibit, violinist Leila Josefowicz will perform a new piece by composer Matthias Pintscher. I just listened to a piece by Pintscher titled "Whirling tissue of light," a piano solo with an eerie air that seems all too fitting to the garish paintings and the isolated viewing of art during pandemic times. I like this multidisciplinary approach and live-experience share, especially from a space that so often feels shrouded in exclusion: more of this please art world!

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Picturing Pandemics: From the Distant Past to the Recent Present

Princeton University, Princeton Art Museum / webinar via zoom

November 20, 2020 / 2pm ET / free w/registration

How will this current pandemic manifest in visual art? Will it be a digital hellscape of zooms? Or maybe someone out there is going in the opposite direction, some feral sculptor turning sticks into COVID molecules or drawing with forest fire ash, outside in the free, safe breaths of nature? Naturally, pandemics throughout the ages found their way into the symbolic world of art, some renderings of which are on display in a Princeton Art Museum exhibit titled Images of Illness. From the bubonic plague to the AIDS crisis, the images brought together serve as representations of life, death, emotion and history each with a differing perspective and media. Bryan Just, Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas, Laura Giles Curator of Prints and Drawings, Veronica White Curator of Academic Programs, and graduate student in Molecular Biology Robbie LeDesma will discuss the ancient to contemporary ways artists visualize the effects of the seen and unseen worlds of collective disease. 

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of November 8th

 Top Picks for Art Online Week of November 8th

Virtual Insights: New Approaches to American Art 

American Folk Art Museum/ Zoom conversation & Q+A

November 10, 2020 / 6-7:30pm / free w/registration (donation suggested)

This event poses the question: What does it mean to be defined as "American" within museums today? Curators will explore their work and the ways in which they look into the past to recontextualize, retell, reimagine the relationship between the many facets of social, politial and artistic histories that they draw upon. Panelists include curator Sylvia Yount who oversees the department of historical African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American art, from the colonial period to the early-twentieth century at MoMA, Layla Bermeo curator of Paintings, Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Kimberli Grant the McKinnon Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA. This talk is in conjunction with the current exhibit on view at the American Folk Art Museum in New York titled American Perspectives. 

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Specific Objects: A Donald Judd Symposium, Part 1

Museum of Modern Art/Online Lecture/Symposium

November 12, 2020 / 6:30pm ET / free with registration

Donald Judd is one of those sculptors whose work you see in photos and kind of shrug off. But, seeing his work in person is a whole other experience. His geometric blocks, plays of color and intersecting lines become ominous, luminous forms that represent a mastery of negative space. I don't really know much about his background (in fact, I just this minute learned that he is from Missouri!), or history of his work, but I do know that his minimalist, unmistakable compositions overpower any room that encounters them. This Symposium is part of the exhibit Judd currently on view at MoMA in NYC. 

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Tumultuous Absence: The 26th Annual New Jersey Book Arts Symposium 

Rutgers Univeristy Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives/Online Symposium 

November 12 + 13 / 10am-8pm ET (see schedule for sessions) / free w/registration

I have a distinct memory of trvaeling to a basement-like room in the bowels of the Rutgers University Library to stare at a book of myth that literally had the seeds from a fruit embedded in its pages, marveling at the white glove handling of the rare and beautiful piece. Years later, a friend of mine I met at Rutgers worked for the Rare Book Room at the Strand, a quiet, secluded, ornate space of musty treasures, inclusing Yoko Ono's Grapefruit at the time. I love art books and the intense craft and delicate care that goes into their construction. This annual conference looks into the creativity and practice of the art book with talks, workshops and presentations. Two artists involved in the second half of this year's online version of the event (the earlier half took place last week) include the pulpy rough hewn pages of artist Aimee Lee and the layered wonders of Julie Chen. 

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Domitor 2020 Online Conference

Domitor/Zoom conference

November 17-20, 2020 / see schedule for times/ free w/registration

Domitor was the name considered by the Lumière brothers, the pioneers of cinema, as a nomiker for their grand invention (eventually, obviously, settling on“Cinématographe").  Today, Domitor is an international association for early cinema, roughly the period from 1890 to 1915. "With its interest in the longue durée and in placing the cinema in a broader intermedial context, the field of early cinema studies has strong affinities with the study of early popular visual culture, media archaeology, and histories of 'pre-' or 'proto-' cinematic media from chronophotography to the magic lantern and shadow plays," the conception of the moving image repsonsible for today's visually saturated image world. The organization's annual conference takes place in Paris, France but this year, it will be held online for all to see! Wednesday Nov. 18th seems partiularly appealing to me with discussions on "Cameras, Projectors & Trick Photography"and "Useful Animation in Early Cinema." The presentations are currently available online, live discussions will take place on the 17-20th. 

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of November 1st

Top Picks for Art Online Week of November 1st

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 25th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 25th

Home Truths: Films About Housing Rights, Displacement, And The Meaning of Home

Anthology Film Archives / online film series

ends October 31, 2020 / streaming / free-$10

Inspired by the recent COVID-19 induced housing crisis, this series "highlights a variety of films past and present that have dramatized the plight of those who wage a daily battle for safe and secure housing, that have unveiled the structural and economic forces that render that struggle so difficult, and that have chronicled the efforts of activists to make change." The lineup features a huge array of styles and filmmakers, including two from Nick Broomfield, Sidney Sokhona's Nationalité: Immigré (1975) and master of non-brevity, Frederick Wiseman with his 1997, 195 minute opus Public Housing. Streaming for free via Vimeo, thanks to Lux, The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000, Patrick Keiller) is one not to miss. The film takes the documentary scaffold (interviews, archival footage, B-roll) and layers a sense of fiction through an unidentified narrator (Tilda Swinton!) recording their covert project to explore the British housing predicament. The film moves through many neighborhoods and issues, a journey that manages to make one feel as if they are one with the curious speaker, observing habitats & cultures while quietly living among them.  

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Electric Lit Virtual Salon: Magical Feminism w/Elissa Washuta + Marie-Helene Bertino

Electric Lit / online editorial discussion via crowdcast

October 26, 2020 / 6pm ET / $10

Magic. I'm not sure what this has in store but I do tend to trust the Executive Director of Electric Lit Halimah Marcus who will be leading this discussion about magic's role in fiction literature as it pertains to subverting expectations, processing trauma and more. Elissa Washuta, member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, a nonfiction writer, an NEA fellow & Creative Capital Creative grantee and Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Parakeet (which, FYI, is on my to-read list!), and an O Henry & Pushcart Prize winner, will discuss "how magic works in practice and as a rhetorical device in fiction." Personally, I'm intrigued by this movement away from the term "magical realism" and into a different realm, one that, instead, seems to identify and uphold the realness in magic. 

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Trailermania

Greg Hamilton / facebook live screening

October 27, 2020/ 9:30pm CT / free

Deep from the basement of a house in Portland, Oregon, Greg Hamilton leads you on a tour of vintage horror, sci-fi and other strange & unusual 16mm film trailers. Greg is a cineaste, filmmaker (whose short film Thou Shall Not Tailgate introduced me to the wonders of Rev. Linville, a Pacific Northwest wacko with a heart of both diamonds & coal), a writer and so much more bringing you into his home to help you remember the smell of celluloid, the heat of the projector, and the communal audience experience of film lovers-- however remote we may be. As Greg points out on the FB invite, "Part entertainment, part cinema education, TRAILERMANIA is a must for movie fans and is full of rarities and old favorites." So pop your popcorn, turn out the lights and be bathed in the oddities and beauty of film trailers glowing from Greg's screen through your own. 

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Unorthodocs.

The Wexner Center for the Arts / online film festival 

October 25- 29, 2020 / streaming, consult schedule (some geoblocking) / sliding scale, donation suggested

Unorthodocs. is an annual series of creative non-fiction filmmaking brought to you by the Ohio-based Wexner Center for the Arts. This year, the lineup is available online (with some ticket limitations, check site for listings) and will also feature a conversation between each filmmaker and an equally as impressive member of the film community-- critics, filmmakers, film scholars etc. Karim Aïnouz's Nardjes A (2020), which screened at Berlin and Visions Du Reel, centers on a day in the life of an Algerian protestor, a conversation follows the screening between the director and filmmaker/cinematographer/bombastic dresser Kirsten Johnston (Dick Johnson Is Dead, 2020). Other films in the series include Cecilia Aldarondo's Landfall (2020), David Osit's Mayor (2020) and Ephraim Asili's The Inheritance (2020) (which I will finally get to see)! The sliding scale ticket price is a thoughtful gift-- support this Midwest beacon of culture if you can! 

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The University & The Prison

Pozen Family Center for Human Rights + Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago / zoom panel

October 30, 2020 / 12-1:30pm CT / free w/eventbrite registration

For work, I watch a lot of films and the prison industrial complex is a topic I constantly confront in the nonfiction universe. After years of watching these films, I continue to wonder: is anything improving? Are any of these films doing much beyond shining a spotlight or educating on the problem? This panel seems to wonder the same: is all of the scholarship coming out of universities on mass incarceration making any real change to the systems they are studying? This panel will look at the possibilities for change and the challenges that universities face in doing the work of dismantling this broken system. Speakers include Matt Epperson (Director, Smart Decareration Project) Gina Fedock (Asst. Prof. School of Social Service Administration), Michelle Jones (Scholar, Artist, Activist, PhD Student, NYU), Alis Kim (Director of Human Rights Practice, Pozen Center Human Rights Lab) and Reuben Miller (author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration).

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

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. 

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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."

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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. 

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 11th

 Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 11th

Process & Performance, Pamela Z

EMPAC/zoom discussion, examples + demonstration

Oct 15, 2020/ 6pm ET/ free

So I just went down a Pamela Z rabbit hole and am now a bit obsessed: this video is gorgeous & insane! Using a mix of software, gesture-controlled MIDI instruments & more, Pamela Z layers together musical phrases, performance, visuals with precision, beauty and even hints of humor. Watching this one video it felt like she became a sort of cyborg, enhancing the sonic space through movement-- like a theramin plus-- while singing with the heart of a very human person. When experimental music reaches the heights of Pamela Z's work one truly feels like they are living in a futuristic world, one where creativity and art are existing in a whole new universe full of endless, multi-displinary possibilities. Pamela Z is doing a residency at EMPAC (the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center@RPI), this talk will speak on the new work she is creating there and her visionary process as a whole. 

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The 28th Annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival

Online festival + performances + lectures via FB Live + Youtube

October 15-17, 2020/ free, some registration for limited events

The first time I read Tennessee Williams was in high school, The Glass Menagerie. When reading that play something hit me, something that felt familiar and tangible, much more human than the stale Shakespeare or the 20 millionth production of The Wiz that my school put on. There was some kind of stage direction for a screen to project the images of Blue Roses (OMG! David Lynch, my teenage brain exploded) on stage, an erasure of the four-walled space, an augmentation of what was possible, possibly my first introduction to performance art and straight line to my first love, cinema. When I saw this event come up on my feed one presentation on Saturday (October 17 from 2:15-3:15pm CT) reminded me of that sharp distant memory: Thomas Keith (William's editor for New Directions since 2002) will speak on the fest's featured play, Summer & Smoke, focusing on "Williams’ inherent and natural inclination toward experimental, visual, spatial, plastic and presentational aspects of theatre that defied and expanded the bounds of traditional realism, with some focus on early drafts of the play, which included elements of film"-- oh hell yes! 

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Postcolonial Film and the Archive: History, Theory, Practice

C21 Media Studies Research Collaboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, UWM Moving Image Society + UWM College of Letters and Science/ online symposium

October 16, 2020/12-4pm CT/ free w/registration

From the event page: "Bringing together scholars to examine media from across the globe, this event will explore the historical, cultural, and political value and use of colonial and ethnographic films in connection to cultural heritage, preservation, and appropriation. From reexamining the ways in which archives and their materials are mobilized to tell certain narratives and not others, and the complexity of preserving and researching these materials in varying contexts, to interrogating the ontological and indexical status of film as memory artifacts, this symposium will raise questions about cultural heritage, ownership, historiography, and gaps and exclusions in classical film history approaches to the study of 'postcolonial' film." The line up of presentations is overwhelming but the two that quickly stood out to me were films from Polish settlements in the Brazilian Wilderness in the 1930s and also a talk on the state's role in the preservation and/or destruction of archives using the largest collection of films in Ghana as a case study. The event will explore "the history, theory, and practice of postcolonial film and archives" from a broad array of visual pasts whose implications and frames are forever burnt into the present. 

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Mikio Sakabe

Tokyo Fashion Week/online fashion show

October 17, 2020/12am CT (3pm Tokyo?)/ free

Won't lie, I do not know much about the brand Mikio Sakabe, or Tokyo fashion week for that matter, but ever since glimpsing the label's collaborations with the footwear company grounds I've followed them on Instagram with a cult-like fervor. Their clothes have a delicate feel (think sheer, lacey, florals) but with a restricting edge (a tight buckle, a bounding tie-back, arms of a formidable length). The shoes though, the shoes! Baubles of round plastic, breathy looking knits, translucent rubber, streetwear ready sneakers (and sandals!?) that scream at me on the internet asking to transport me into some cloud-like headspace where I can float ethereally through the greys and chaos of a cityscape....ahhh...I am totally aware of the frivolity of fashion but, I tend to treat it like I do most art: dreaming is a needed escape, creativity is a form of resilience, the senses can define and change lives. Also: donate to your local food bank...it's all about balance.

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