Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video
November 8, 2013–February 5, 2016
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave at 92nd St
New York, NY 10128
Hours: Saturday–Tuesday 11am–5:45pm,
Wednesday closed (Shops/Café open 11am–3pm),
Thursday 11am–8pm, Friday 11am–4pm
T +1 212 423 3200
F +1 212 423 3232
Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines The Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.
Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.
Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to Egypt, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s Goodkind media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.
The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.
Sights and Sounds will culminate with a publication presenting curatorial statements, essays, discussions among curators and artists, and descriptions of the films in the series. There will also be a conference for the conclusion of the project in 2016.
#sightsandsounds
Now playing
Cambodia, curated by Erin Gleeson
Through January 30, 2014
The moving image was one of the most popular art forms during Cambodia’s culturally rich Independence years (mid-1950s–early 1970s). Combining available modern technologies with inventive do-it-yourself techniques, full-length feature films rich in magic realism often explored folkloric and mythical themes, starring humans, spirits, and serpents in love triangles and cycles of creation and destruction. These forays were interrupted during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), when an estimated 90 percent of artists and intellectuals were executed, leaving traditions and developing practices to stagnate for decades. Film and video have only recently become strands in the practice of today’s artists. Since 2007 some twenty works have been made by local and diasporic Cambodians.
This selection for Sights and Sounds is a representative sampling of common approaches to video art thus far in Cambodia. Mon Boulet is a document of a public performance centered on catharsis. Untitled, also a performance, but one made explicitly for the camera, symbolically confronts the conditions surrounding today’s aggressive land grabs and forced evictions. The meditative Negligence Leads to Loss; Attention Preserves and the fantastical Neang Neak expose contemporary tensions between spiritual customs and modernization.
Erin Gleeson is Artistic Director of SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh, a nonprofit gallery, reading room, and resource center cofounded in 2011 by Gleeson and the Stiev Selapak artist collective. She divides her time between Phnom Penh and Berlin.
Works include:
Than Sok (b. Takeo, 1984; lives in Phnom Penh)
Negligence Leads to Loss; Attention Preserves, 2009
Video, sound, 9:42 minutes
Khvay Samnang (b. Svay Rieng, 1982; lives in Phnom Penh)
Untitled, 2011
Video, sound, 4:22 minutes
Svay Sareth (b. Battambang, 1972; lives in Siem Reap)
Mon Boulet (My Ball and Chain), 2011
Video, sound, 8:25 minutes
Studio Revolt + Khmer Arts
Neang Neak (Serpent Goddess), 2012
HD video, sound, 3:50 minutes
Upcoming Rotations
Brazil, curated by Luiza Proença
January 31–February 27, 2014
Romania, curated by Daria Ghiu
February 28–March 27, 2014
Peru, curated by Miguel A. López
March 28–April 24, 2014
Additional Rotations through February, 2016
India, curated by Nancy Adajania
Portugal, curated by Miguel Amado
Nigeria, curated by Jude Anogwih
Turkey, curated by Emre Baykal
Vietnam, curated by Zoe Butt
New Zealand, curated by Natasha Conland
Philippines, curated by Joselina Cruz
Singapore, curated by Patrick D. Flores
Colombia, curated by Juan A. Gaitán
Argentina, curated by Inés Katzenstein
China, curated by Carol Yinghua Lu
Cuba, curated by Mailyn Machado
South Africa, curated by Nontobeko Ntombela
Canada, curated by Melanie O’Brian
Egypt, curated by Sarah Rifky
Mexico, curated by María Inés Rodríguez
Angola, curated by Suzana Sousa
Hungary, curated by Tijana Stepanovic
Israel, curated by Chen Tamir
Australia, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe
Poland, curated by Joanna Warsza
Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is organized by Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, and coordinated by Rebecca Shaykin, Leon Levy Assistant Curator.
