Death and Dying

This is the burial hymn for thousands of souls in anthropocentric times. The ghosts of the American way of life. Part of the Hauntology series.

"In 1997 I went to Benares, India to study the Hindu practice of burning the bodies of their dead on the Ganges ghats. My purpose was:

1. To become more at ease with death, a hidden western phenomenon;

2. To de-fuse fear around seeing death;

3. To watch how Hindu elders congregate in Benares to die since dying here in this holy city guarantees "moksha", no rebirth. Visiting temples and ashrams for the elderly allowed me to observe how they use their time and prepare for their eventual passing.

There is so much to absorb: the wetness from the sky. The hooded figure in the box. A big plate of pasta, and that chair on wheels. Messages of moral guidance clash with actions that are on a collision course with dilapidation. And through it all the water runs, the fridge is full and hearts yearn for that which mellows the melody of God’s glockenspiel. For the winds of change rattle the bones of the grim reaper as he swings his scythe in rhythm to a cacophony of corruption intrinsic to this orchestra pit of purgatorial preludes and egg laying swan songs.

In collaboration with Iris McCloughan.

It's not my memory of it is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Mobilizing specific historical records as memories which flash up in moments of danger, the video addresses the expansion and intensification of secrecy practices in the current climate of heightened security. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979.

M+ Museum presented A Body in Hong Kong in two locations as part of Mobile M+: Live Art, 2015. The second site she chose and performed at on December 11 and 12, 2015 was the West Kowloon Cultural District, the site where the M+ Museum would be built. Eiko perhaps covered a longer distance in this performance than any other in the past. This raw landscape, rather unusual in Hong Kong, and its political tenderness play as a background of her performance. A Body in Hong Kong is part of Otake’s ongoing project, A Body in Places.

A detective is hired to find the original copy of a lost ancient book. The book recounts the tale of a plague. A form of radiation, unknown at the present time, activates a virus. The virus affects the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system; fear is converted into sexual frenzies which are reconverted back into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion.

George Barber doffs his cap to the 20th anniversary of Scratch Video with What’s That Sound?, a mesmerizing montage of questions, answers, and the cries and screams of people caught in a disaster movie. The work uses as its starting point, the film Airport '77 where, improbably, a jumbo jet sinks to the bottom of the sea. What follows is a clever amalgamation of absurd linguistics, cries and shouts, highlighting the artist’s permanent fascination with speech, and human reaction to out-of-the-ordinary situations.

The Badger Series has issues and attempts, each episode, to resolve them. Recasting a glove puppet show through his own present day sensibilities, Paul assumes the role of kindly uncle mentor to a household of capersome woodland creatures. Mortality, self-sacrifice, depression, altered states of consciousness and transgressive art practices are all explored as part of their everyday lives together.

Nascentes Morimur grew out of a series of works on autopsy — an earlier video and a number of still images — that were exhibited together as Like a Shipwreck We Die Going Into Ourselves. In an interview on that body of work Wojtasik said: “In the end, doubt has been raised. One starts to look around the room at the living and the dead and question how real one’s own and others’ identities are. At the same time, one may be filled with simultaneous wonder and dread at the sheer fact of being alive in the body.”

-- Kustendorf Film and Music Festival

The Wake was filmed at the Invertebrate Zoology department of the Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh. In this department there are old cabinets full of categorized butterfly specimens, neatly ordered in drawers.  I released into this space 100 live butterflies that flew among the dead specimens.  The result is as if these dead specimens have now come to life.

An animation developed from the collective experiences of a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ people to create a narrative. The result is a queer valentine having a fever dream.

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

A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of a Uitoto man, who worked for the drug Lords in the Colombian Amazon back in the 80s. Following his path between the forest and the ruin of a Narco's mansion imitating the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds the hallucinatory account of a near-death experience.

Eiko edited this video to illuminate, in fast pace, her solo performance project A Body in Places. The red cloth she often uses in her performance is used as a visual link between different places and communities where Eiko performed.

On May 11 2004, Steve Kurtz phoned 911 to report Hope, his wife of 20 years, was unresponsive. When paramedics came to his house, one of them noticed that Kurtz had laboratory equipment, which he used in his art exhibits. The paramedics reported this to police and the FBI sealed off his house.

Authorities later said that Kurtz's wife had died of "heart failure," but he wasn't allowed to return to his home for two days while the FBI confiscated his equipment, and biological samples. They also carted off his books, personal papers and computer.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

Ascensor is an exploration of grief, longing and mysticism through a queer lens. It documents a syncretic ritual that culls from the magical reverberations in Mexican culture to process the unexpected loss of a dear friend. The repetition of the ritual eventually leads to the transcendence of physical space, transforming unrelenting ache into shining resilience.

Audacious romanticism displays gardens fueled by the human heart where feelings blossom amid leaf and brick.

Made with my production class at the art asylum called the San Francisco Art Institute, this wide-screen drama of run-a-way spectacle and crazed emotion depicts a lurid tale of familial fury and unleashed passions. With a $600 budget, a mob of unbridled youth, and the unabashed performance of its leading lady, this epic of desire and repulsion will definitely grab you by both heart and gut.

"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: "When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories."

For the November 13, 2015 opening of the Hiroshima Panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki at Pioneer Works, Eiko performed her solo in honor of the Hiroshima Panels and their creators. Japanese-style painter Iri Maruki, born in Hiroshima, and Western-style painter Toshi Maruki, who went into Hiroshima city just three days after the bombing. The artists decided to paint the panels together, which illuminate the human experiences of the Atomic Bomb. They spent 30 years painting the fifteen Hiroshima Panels, six of which were on display at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In Final Exit, an aged one is confronted with his options in blunt terms. Does he want to drag out his existence, increasingly infirm and a burden to his caretakers, or go quietly before resentment overwhelms sentiment? Does he wish to go on living, the quality of his life increasingly diminishing, or be euthanized? Would he prefer cremation or burial? This video confronts the issues of mortality and advancing decrepitude that faces even the friskiest.

Vanessa is based on the untimely death of Vanessa Jordan. A work about loss and Michelangelo.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

I once read a story about the Tibetan Buddhist Master, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche in a book by death-teacher, Steven Levine. Trungpa went into his son's room and said to him, "I'm dying." And then he said to his son, "You are dying too." This story made a deep impression on me because death is the last taboo, the hidden boogey-man, the unspeakable. It was a beautiful lesson in impermanence this father gave his son.