Angelo Madsen Minax: Screening and Discussion

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, February 29 at 7pm for a screening of works by Angelo Madsen Minax, followed by a discussion with the artist. Minax’s works are fueled by reflections in/of queer subculture and characterized by themes of desire, embodiment, and kinship. The works presented are largely unreleased and previously unseen, observing the Video Data Bank’s recent acquisition of the artist’s archive of early video work.

The screening will start with a selection of the artist’s early works from the newly restored collection Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008. Coming from a music and visual art background, these are Minax’s first video projects in what is now a defined film career. Many of the videos in this collection weren’t initially intended for release and are collaborations with Minax’s friends, partners, and lovers. They are playful, erotic, heavy, crass, and together they create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s. The screening will also include Minax’s Bigger on the Inside (2022), a recent work that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a clip from A BODY TO LIVE IN, a feature film in production.

Building Healthy Relationships (2003, 4 minutes)
A self-help speaker encourages self-reflection. Friends in Chicago hang out.

Complementary parts (2007, 3 minutes)
A minister recounts the perceived catastrophe that is butt sex. Pegging ensues.

Jackhammer (2007, 6 minutes)
Dykes and trans guys take over the Jackhammer for a punk show.

Shave and a Haircut (2006, 15 minutes)
A pro-domme gives her friend a freshly shaved head. In return she gets a buzz cut. A client gets to be a (bound) fly on the wall.

their body is filled with a liquid that tends to spread (2005, 8 minutes)
The disparate chronicles of a high-school wrestling team, a flooded town of aliens, and the love affair between two young men. Performers responded to individual drawings and prompts to collectively generate improvisational dialog during the Pilot Conference: Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass in Chicago in 2004. With Becca Taylor.

Nich Tries to not remember Indiana (2003, 15 minutes)
A two-part treatise on needs, met and unmet. A painter putters around his apartment. Spoils his cereal with rotten milk, gets a do-over with a fresh gallon. Over the course of the filming the relationship between the performer and the filmmaker unravels into disclosures of childhood sexual abuse. Rotten milk is the metaphor for all human suffering.

bigger on the inside (2022, 12 minutes)
From an isolated wooded cabin a trans man stargazes, scruff chats with guys, watches YouTube tutorials, takes drugs, and lies about taking drugs—feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Relative to the immensity of longing, the bodily insides become both portal and lens through which to probe the porousness between interior and exterior, the micro and macro. Nudes and landscapes are equally erotic, as Eros is an issue of boundaries: When I desire you, a part of me is gone.

A BODY TO LIVE IN (work-in-progress, 7-minute clip)

The screening is organized in collaboration with Video Data Bank.

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.