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Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, June 28 for The City Bridges are Open Again, screening recent films by Masha Godovannaya followed by a conversation between Godovannaya and Maria Vinogradova; and on Friday, July 1 and Sunday, July 3 for Tulapop Saenjaroen: A (Digressive) Focus Program, a three-part program presenting recent films by Saenjaroen in dialogue with text, audio, and moving-image works by Kelley Dong, Anahita Jamali Rad, RUTMEAT, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Evan Calder Williams, Jia Zhangke, and Zheng Yuan, programmed by Steff Hui Ci Ling.
Scroll below for more information and links. Admission starts at 5 dollars unless otherwise indicated.
The City Bridges are Open Again: Recent Films by Masha Godovannaya
Friday, June 28, 2022, 7pm
As Katerina Belaglozova writes, “in Masha Godovannaya’s experimental films, intimacy is associated with an activist fervor, while a well-targeted irony at the level of editing and gesture nevertheless affords space to an uncompromising empathy with the small and vulnerable. Masha’s overwhelmingly personal view highlights the structural and political place of sensuous imagery and reveals the absurdity and machismo in the self-representation of political ideologies. Her feminist, queer and decolonial methodology is not just an idea that permeates the filmmaker’s work, but a method that forms the basis for editing heterogeneous materials, from film fragments and found video footage to her own material and the films of other filmmakers that have been reinterpreted through editing. Defragmentation, layering, interspersing and analytically separating images as well as collective collaborative laboring with other artists and queer kin-folks comprises a queer strategy where “decolonizing vision means changing the entire order of things.” This approach to cinema is intertwined with the practice of living and being with others, human and other-than-human, and is open to collectivity and transformation.”
e-flux Screening Room presents Godovannaya's Her* Hands and His Shape (14 minutes, 2017); Laika. The Last Flight (4.30 minutes, 2017), Only Two Words (10 minutes, 2018) An Address to Jeanne (4 minutes, 2020), Flatness Surface Mutation Shift: I Hand Out Flesh to You, You Will Manage It (22.40 minutes, 2020), Landscapes of Nosferatu (6 minutes, 2020), and The City Bridges Are Open Again (9:34 minutes, 2020); intoduced by Godovannaya and followed by a conversation between her and film scholar Maria Vinogradova.
Read more on the films here.
Tulapop Saenjaroen: A (Digressive) Focus Program
In three parts, July 1–3, 2022
“Tulapop Saenjaroen’s videos swerve around serious and whimsical subjects and moods. Just in the same way that work and leisure in this world are too close for comfort, Saenjaroen’s contemporary work subjectivities traverse a spectrum of relaxation, experimentation, and social relationships as they take on shades of self-medication, exploitation, networking, and multi-performing for the diffuse labor market. However, the videos do not depict workers working, but present work within a theater of his cinematic construction.
Departing from the failed factography of social realism and its historical political agendas, this program recognizes work without workers, workers between work but not exactly not working, and people who are working in order to work, in order to present methods beyond the sheer representation of working that instead describe how modern labor is (de)materialized, (de)regulated, and (dis)organized.
Organized in three parts, the program is loosely arranged around a pair of themes: work and non-work. While a focus program conventionally, well, focuses on a single artist, I wanted to put together a “digressive” focus program that is anchored in the ideas and questions compelled by Tulapop’s practice, and present them in dialogue with other artists’ works, ideas, and questions that have been deepened by my viewing and thinking about his videos. Through some of the associative pathways and surprising motifs that have surfaced while making the program, these works mutually offer ways to reflect on Tulapop’s works too. I hope that this program can pique our labor consciousness, and offer insight, through abstraction and storytelling in cinema, into our individual and collective experience of navigating our agency between work and non-work.”
—Steff Hui Ci Ling
In the absence of the artist, Tulapop Saenjaroen: A (Digressive) Focus Program is presented alongside a new interview with Saenjaroen in conversation with Leo Cocar. Read it here.
Part one:
Screening: On floating and eating with Kelley Dong, Tulapop Saenjaroen, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and Zheng Yuan
Friday, July 1, 2022, 7pm
In this first of three programs, water entities coincidentally emerged as a motif against the hardness of parsing the formative cruelty of the work-non-work confusion. Whether it is in a public pool in Saenjaroen’s Tales of Swimming Pool, some Mediterranean beach in William’s Roman Letters, a textbook description of the life cycle of a barnacle in Saenjaroen’s Notes from the Periphery, meandering around an island state in Suwichakornpong and Saenjaroen’s Nightfall, baby blue textures in Dong’s Pears, or the temperamental Yellow River in Zheng’s After The Flood, it sure is nice not to think of liquidity as capital.
A reading by Evan Calder Williams will take place in the library at the Screening Room immediately following the screening, as the second part of the program.
Part two:
Reading: Evan Calder Williams, Roman Letters with Anahita Jamali Rad and Steff Hui Ci Ling
Friday, July 1, 2022, 9pm at e-flux Screening Room Library
Free admission.
The two screenings in this program draw their titles from two of the letters in Evan Calder Williams’s Roman Letters (2012). The second part of our program features a reading from this book, as well as from new work by Williams. Steff Hui Ci Ling will also read from her recently published collection of anti-work poems, Mixed Martial Arts (2022), and Anahita Jamali Rad will read from still (2020), a poetry collection that “propose[s] an alternative to action, a way to be the wrench in the cogs of the machine, a way to jam the signal by refusing receptivity.”
Part three:
Screening: On trash collectors and Michael Jackson Impersonators with RUTMEAT, Tulapop Saenjaroen, Jia Zhangke, and Zheng Yuan
Sunday, July 3, 2022, 7pm
In the third and last part of the program, Saenjaroen’s 2020 video People on Sunday provides a kind of gravity for the evening’s screening and listening session. This work depicts people acting (working) as different versions of themselves—their non-working selves—while their actual selves work in the form of acting. This program gives examples of labor as a kind of capitalist dramaturgy—the performance of our not-selves as happier, more fun, talented, or famous, as people or places in history. Featuring alongside it Saenjaroen’s Klai, Zheng Yuan’s Dream Delivery, RUTMEAT’s Only Workers, and Jia Zhangke’s The Hedonists, many of the works in this last part of the program contain “impersonations”: between an employee and an employer, the parthenon in a shanzhai park, and as extras in a historical reenactment village.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our Screening Room events mailing list here. For more information contact program@e-flux.com.
