Uriel Orlow: Affirming Difference Through Rituals of Filming

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, March 9 at 7pm for Affirming Difference Through Rituals of Filming, a screening of Uriel Orlow’s films followed by a video conversation with the artist. 

Uriel Orlow’s moving-image art is research-driven, process-oriented, and often in dialogue with other disciplines and people. His film projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, and social and ecological justice. Situated across gallery and cinema contexts, his moving-image works bring various image regimes and narrative modes into correspondence attempting to affirm difference rather than instill sameness. 

The screening constitutes the first event of Films to be Made and Unmade, the last of four chapters of Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art, a series of screenings taking place at e-flux Screening Room in monthly chapters between December 2022 and March 2023. Read more on the series here.

Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art is produced and organized by e-flux; with the support of the German Film Office, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut and German Films.

Films

Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal) (2017, 28 minutes)
Imbizo Ka Mafavuke is an experimental documentary set  in the near future at the edge of a nature reserve in Johannesburg. A kind of Brechtian “Lehrstück,” the film shows the preparations for a people’s tribunal where traditional healers, activists, and lawyers come together to discuss indigenous knowledge and bio-prospecting. The pharmaceutical industry has come to consider traditional medicine as a source for identification of new bioactive agents that can be used in the preparation of synthetic medicine. This raises questions about intellectual copyright protection of indigenous knowledge. Imbizo Ka Mafavuke asks who benefits when plants become pharmaceuticals, given multiple claims to ownership, priority, locality, and appropriation. The protagonists in the film slip into different roles and make use of real-world cases involving multinational pharmaceuticals scouting in indigenous communities for the next wonder drug. Ghosts of colonial explorers, botanists, and judges observe the proceedings.

Veilleurs d’images (2017, 13 minutes)
Veilleurs d’images shows a prisoner of a high-security prison in France digitizing a collection of stereoscopic glass negatives. The client is the MuCEM (Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée) in Marseille. Through working with travel photographs shot by a Mr. Kostioukovsky between 1904 and 1939, the prisoner gains insights into history and his own condition, as well as a view out into the world beyond the prison walls.

Learning From Artemisia (2019, 14 minutes)
In Learning from Artemisia, Orlow explores plant healing and global power relations through Artemisia afra, the African wormwood, an indigenous medicinal plant cultivated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, alongside other African countries, and used for the treatment of malaria. Despite its proven effectiveness and simplicity, the World Health Organization does not recommend the use of this plant material, in any form, including tea, for the treatment or the prevention of malaria.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility            
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. 
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.          
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.