In this surreal experimental narrative, there’s something wrong with a patch of sky. As it travels over Southern England, objects cast up into it come down hugely enlarged, bloated. Meanwhile in London, the patch is in fact a troubling scab on a crippled old man’s head. As the scab develops, all he can do is wait, going through the changes, led on gently by the idiot-savant son with his childlike multiple identities.
Filmed entirely in Sweden, VIEWFINDER is a surreal sound-film that entangles gestures of place, belonging, and monument. Informed by archival research, oral history, and folk stories, the film focuses on Black immigrants who have recently migrated to Sweden. These performers enact dance-like choreographies in critical sites across the coastal town of Varberg, generated in response to an absence of Black life found in the municipal archives.
In The Lost Art of the Future, Cuthand talks about artists he has known who have passed while living with HIV/AIDS, and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer.
Handy Man examines the window as a site of voyeurism and surveillance. With his Hi-8 camera, Henricks documents two workers in his interior courtyard. The camerawork has a secretive and furtive feel, treating the male body as an erotic object. This footage forms the basis of a video which attempts to implicate the viewer in processes of exhibitionism and image fetishization. Handy Man is part of a trilogy of works exploring one of the principle metaphors of video: the window.
Sections 1-30 of an incomplete extended poem describing the artist's connection to the radical black tradition. The completed poem will be formed of 180 sections.
"Lessons are all about constraints; they are thirty seconds, must feature a black figure, and I have rules about where to make cuts, how to edit sound, etc."
— Martine Syms in conversation with Aram Moshayedi, Mousse Magazine
Secret number... secret shape... knower of the secret name... God of the realm of night - I summon you, 'Son of Sin'... arise!
In this interview, American writer, artist, performer Eileen Myles (b.1949) discusses the various philosophies that motivate her work, including the language of film, embodied performance, and the alienation evoked by bodily vulgarity. Myles links her wide range of artistic and literary practice with notions of abstraction, improvisation, and the mythology of gender, which she explores in relation to her own identity as a working, middle-class lesbian woman. She reflects on the significance of geographical locations, both New York City and San Diego, on her art, and shares how her past struggles with addiction have shaped her life and practice.
"The world will devour you...."
A group of cops laugh and talk, while scanning the street for suspicious activity. An extreme close-up of a sensuously exposed neck; a soft pink fleshy ear turns to reveal an inquisitive hostile eye....
In this interview, extreme performance artist and 1990s culture warrior Ron Athey (b.1961) discusses the genesis of his provocative performance style and the memories and desires that continue to motivate his practice. Athey describes how his particular approach to performance developed dually from his religious upbringing and exposure to devotional theater, as well as from his later interest in the DIY grandiosity of the Los Angeles punk scene.
The police phoned. They left a message on the machine. They said he was dead. The video unwinds through stories of sex for rent, unclaimed bodies, cigarette burns, and other monuments of life’s long run from wall to wall. Cut the Parrot is three grotesque comedies in one: the stories of Gerry, Susan, and Albert. Songs of hope and heartbreak spill from the mouths of the performers. The order of impersonation rules.
This is an over-the-top Video bouquet audaciously delivered by flamboyant "Pan" – like poets determined to paint the world pink.
An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.
Directors: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys
Director Of Photography: Samuli Haavisto
Producers: Mariana Silva, Pedro Neves Marques
Co Editors: Zack Khalil, Adam Khalil
Commissioned By: inhabitants, Contour Biennale 8, Natasha Ginawala
Executive Producer: Steve Holmgren
"In Some Dark Place, filmmaker Cecelia Condit explores the dislocations of identity and memory that aging forces upon us, without losing sight of life's beauty."
— Milwaukee Film Festival, 2016
"I have always explored the eerie, dark side of human nature."
— Cecelia Condit
At the age of twenty-four, Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh (b.1950), moved to New York, where he has created and documented time-specific, conceptual art performances since the 1970s. In this interview, Hsieh discusses his formative years and philosophical moorings. This dialogue includes description of the artist’s early period of painting, his military service in Taiwan, and the cultural atmosphere of a country then undergoing massive political change. Much of the discussion focuses specifically on Hsieh’s understanding of the relationship of art and life, his investment in “free thinking,” and the politics of documentation. For Hsieh, the ability to think freely is art’s bottom line—he believes the essence of his work lies in human communication. To this end, Hsieh insists that his work, though incredibly personal, is not autobiographical, but philosophical.
Blood percolates beneath the hot skin of sweat soaked men as they wrestle with primal urges that rip open hearts, tie the gut in knots and turn emotions inside out. With tortured mind the men must choose a future of "anger", or the warm "sweetness" that hides within their injured souls.
Biting Nations, a video produced in collaboration with Luna Montenegro, Lisa Bradley, Arantxa Johnson questions the assumption of fixed national identities and investigates one’s multiple notions of geographical belonging. In the performance the bitting of the fake nails with painted flags from the countries where the artists are culturally or personally related to create a disturbing feeling in the spectator. It looks at how diasporic identities can be defined across various nations and in between distant cultures.
Leafless is a poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.
“But the sun is also fierce; neither graceful athlete nor geometrician’s dummy will embody Apollo, the idol of light.”
- Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956)
Kirsten Stoltmann's video, I Spill My Guts Everyday for Nothing, is exactly that, a portrait of the artist spilling her Guts with a blank expression on her face. Again, Kirsten emerges as an empathetic anti-hero, who, in her own need for confessional exposure, must be regarded as equal parts comic and tragic. The work has unexpected power in its simplicity and humor.
-- James Rondeau
This title is only available as a 3x loop on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
Adapted from a performance by the same name, this courageous video fuses autobiographical material with information about how an alcoholic family perpetuates addictive behavior. Elements of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, such as the “Hi, my name is...” introduction are used along with photo-montage and a disjointed narrative. In addition to being shown at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, Trick Or Drink has been used regularly by hospitals and alcohol treatment centers throughout the United States.
In 2002, my troupe, La Pocha Nostra and I were invited to conduct a workshop at Columbia College in Chicago with 15 students and faculty from different departments. At the end of the two-week workshop, we created a large-scale performance-installation with the participants. Canadian video artist Liz Singer was invited to shoot the entire process, from the early workshop exercises, meant to connect students with their bodies and build a sense of community, up to opening night... In this documentary we reveal the working methods and radical pedagogy of La Pocha Nostra.
Created from 2014 footage shot at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts Gallery with a mirrored curtain, the performer here meets a ghost of herself.
Performer: Elisa Osborne
Camera: Liliana Gao
Editor: Adam Burke
Special Thanks to Ethan Cohen
Mutiny employs a panoply of expression, gesture, and repeated movement. Its central images are of women: at home, on the street, at the workplace, at school, talking, singing, jumping on trampolines, playing the violin. The syntax of the film reflects the possibilities and limitations of speech, while “politically, physically, and realistically” flirting with the language of opposition.
You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.
A young man of the "Modern Age" ponders sits alone to ponder "prehistoric life" and discovers that he has fine-tuned those primitive instincts in the Times he now lives. This is "food for thought", heated, stirred and serve
Forming a loose trilogy with Rankus’s two previous works (Naked Doom and She Heard Voices), Nerve Language furthers his visual investigation into the ambiguous mingling of inner and outer worlds. In strikingly composed images employing tableaux vivant, assemblage and collage, Rankus fabricates a universe where the human body does not possess a discrete boundary, but is imagined into objects, causing the living subject to contemplate its own objectness. The soundtrack, composed by Bob Snyder, provides a wry commentary on Rankus' vision.
