Death and Dying

In collaboration with Iris McCloughan.

Letter to a missing woman, based partly on memories of someone who has been a political fugitive since 1983, combines documentary "evidence" and fiction in an imaginative reconstruction of public documents and private history. This is a quiet, obsessive piece addressing the human costs and repercussions of re-inventing oneself – one’s body, memories, and future – as a living piece of propaganda. The writer/narrator of this "crazy letter" is an unreliable one, a composite of half-truths, paranoid digressions, and feelings of loss.

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.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. 

"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."

— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018

"On January 22, 1987 an unjustly convicted Budd Dwyer grasped onto the pages of his final speech as Pennsylvania's State Treasurer before shooting himself in front of news cameras. Our current year of armageddon, recession, and occupation resonates as a fitting time to step into Budd's shoes (and perhaps others who sought freedom the same way.) I set up a mini news conference with antiquated, glitchy analog cameras, mixers, players, and decks with the goal of recording Budd's speech in one take.

High Five usually comes across as absurd and silly, and generally gets a laugh when shown. I appreciate this response and agree it is quite ridiculous on the surface. However few know the true dark meaning of the piece, which was my personal contribution to a ceremony commemorating the twentieth anniversary of my mother's suicide.

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.

In response to BLM events and to the whole world of injustice, slaughter and abuse... a small comment.

–– Ken Kobland

A daughter leads her mother on a rope while they take a walk, looking for a place where the mother can bid her final farewell. Before she leaves, they have a picnic, she sings a song, and they chat about the family. An absurd domestic drama played out against the background of a summer’s day by the seaside.

This sensualist's dream follows Louise Brooks look-alike Rodney O'Neal Austin on his search for the Beloved. From the cabaret to opium dens and dancing graces this homage to early sound film explores a world teeming with the mysteries of longing and death. Music by Trance Mission and Minnie Pearl Necklace.

Billion Dollar Bimbo: A Musical is a story of a young Hollywood actress’s psychological roller coaster ride through loss and redemption. One day on set the actress witnesses her mother collapse in the middle of shooting. Thinking her dead, the woman quickly spins out of control, immediately descending into drug use and promiscuity. The daughter’s depression-induced mania is assuaged when the mother recovers, but only briefly. When the mother quickly dies, the forlorn daughter plummets again into hopelessness and seeks solace in religion.

"This movie was collected for four years before being sprayed scattershot over 28 minutes of psychic mayhem. The line between living and dead is a frontier crossed and re-crossed here. The living are dead while the dead are animated, breathing, swimming, giving birth. Consumed by the animal life of the city, the artist undertakes a first person journey, producing diary notes from one of the most skilled lens masters of the new generation. The camera is her company in this duet of death, the instrument that permits her to see the impossible, the unbearable, the invisible."

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.