Walker Moving Image Commissions 2017

The Walker Moving Image Commissions returns for a second season this summer. Artists Marwa Arsanios, Yto Barrada, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, and Renée Green have each been commissioned to create a new work to be shown online.

Their works respond to the inspirations, inquiry, and influence of Harun Farocki (1944–2014), a key artist in the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. Farocki’s prolific output as a filmmaker, writer, activist and teacher is characterized by his incisive and sustained critique of media habits and its effect on everyday lives. From the relationships between computer gaming and mass militarization to the role of research as a form of politics, Farocki developed intertextual relationships between the occupations of artist, documentarian, editor, and analyst.

Drawing together an array of footage, photographs, and texts from archival and contemporary sources, the four new works each address ideas of experience as unclaimed, collective, or invisible.

Marwa Arsanios
Who is afraid of ideology? Part I
Arsanios’ film examines the structures of self-governance and knowledge production fostered by the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement. She asks: what kinds of democracies are enabled without a state, and what kind of ecology is produced under the conditions of war? With non-diegetic sound, the recorded dialogues are divorced from each speaker. The faces of speaking subjects subsequently appear on camera as muted bodies, foregrounding the complex difference of what it might mean to be heard and what it might mean to be understood—two different things. (2017, video, 22 minutes)

Yto Barrada
Ether Reveries (Suite for Thérèse Rivière no.2)
As much a poetic enigma as it is a portrait of identity, Ether Reveries takes as its starting point the work and life of Thérèse Rivière (1901–70), a French anthropologist. Drawing together footage, photographs, and texts from archival sources as well as the artist’s personal collection of materials, Barrada portrays life and commerce in the Grand Socco and medina in the heart of Tangier. (2017, video, 6 minutes)

Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz
Telepathic Improvisation
With allusions to violent social conditions both past and present, Boudry/Lorenz invite the viewer to telepathically communicate with elements depicted onscreen—humans and non-humans, movements, speeches, gestures, music, light, and smoke—to explore ways in which others might strive for alternative political and sexual imaginations. (2017, video, 20 minutes)

Renée Green
ED/HF
Following the path of not-knowing, Renée Green’s film is a cinematic meditation on lived experience, writing, film and mourning. Conceived as a “film as a conversation,” Green’s ED/HF is a palimpsestic work that touches on the many thresholds opened while thinking about an artist’s life. Questions of language, history, and image reproduction technologies are rendered into a touching threnody, a mournful celebration of the power of art, film and poetry. (2017, video, 33 minutes)

Through September 10, the Walker Moving Image Commissions 2017 are on view here.

Major support for Walker Moving Image Commissions is provided by the Bentson Foundation.