e-flux presents February screenings, music, and discussions.
With Shelly Silver; Marta Popivoda and Ana Janevski; Daniella Brito, Lex Brown, Leila Weefur, and Nile Harris; Agnieszka Polska; Straub-Huillet and Annett Busch; Dorit Chrysler, the Optipus Collective, and Cara Manes; Marwa Arsanios and Nele Wohlatz; and World Records, Onyeka Igwe, Laura Huertas Millán, Jeannette Muñoz, Mileidy Orozco Domicó, and Syma Tariq.
Scroll down for details and links.
Thursday, February 2, 2023, 7pm
Living Together With: screening and discussion with Shelly Silver
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Shelly Silver has been making films for nearly thirty years, at the intersection of documentary, fiction, video art, and experimental film. Her moving-image works often examine different subject positions and kinds of storytelling, the contradictory nature of memories, and the tensions between real and constructed, individual actions, and collective responsibility. Many of her later films are also examinations of place, intimacy, and boundaries, putting emphasis on the diversity and complexity of the (personal, sensual, physical, social) fabric in, and with which, we live. In Meet the People (1986, 16 minutes), Things I Forget to Tell Myself (1989, 2 minutes), We (1990, 4 minutes), and a tiny place that is hard to touch (2019, 38 minutes), Silver sustains the ambiguity of the real while deconstructing prevailing patriarchal representations that perpetuate existing ways of seeing, as well as exposes the inevitably political character of the practice of filmmaking itself. The screening will be followed by an in-person discussion with Shelly Silver. Read more on the films and event here.
Tuesday, February 7, 2023, 7pm
Screening and discussion: Marta Popivoda, Landscapes of Resistance
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Sonja Vujanović, 97 years old, was an anti-fascist fighter and the first Serbian partisan, interned in the camps of Auschwitz, then Ravensbrück. Marta Popivoda and her partner Ana Vujanović (Sonja’s granddaughter) have been filming her in Belgrade for 14 years, recording the tumultuous account of a woman at war. Landscapes are delicately overlayed onto her voice, making it resonate, from the past and from the present. The militancy of the elder woman gradually comes to recall another: that of the couple, who have fled Serbia and its “rampant capitalism on the outskirts of Europe, homophobia and populism.” The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation between the filmmaker Marta Popivoda and curator Ana Janevski. It constitutes the fourth event of “Landscapes To Be Deciphered,” the second chapter of the four-part series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. Read more on the event here.
Tuesday, February 14, 2023, 7pm
Lex Brown: The Glass Eye and Communication
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The evening will commence with a screening of Lex Brown’s film Communication (2021), followed by the world premiere of her film The Glass Eye (2023). Afterwards, Brown will be in conversation with series curator Daniella Brito. The screening constitutes the first program in the three-part series What are you afraid of? taking place at e-flux Screening Room in February and March 2023. Across these two films, Brown converges the language of speculative fiction with theatrical strategies like satire and dark humor to chronicle a world governed by a fictional media conglomerate called Omnesia. Set in a vaguely distant future, the people of Earth no longer exist. The catalyst for their end appears to be late stage capitalism—a lecherous force that haunts and surveils in both films. In Communication, Omnesia workers—each of whom is a character performed by Brown herself—plot the displacement of the people of the fictional city, New Framingham. In The Glass Eye, Omnesia executives “delete” a woman that uncovers a range of human emotions, thought to be rendered obsolete. Read more on the films and event here.
Thursday, February 16, 2023, 7pm
Films by Leila Weefur and Nile Harris
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The evening will commence with a screening of Harris’s film fill it with air (call it self care) (2021, 20 minutes) followed by two films by Weefur, Between Beauty and Horror (2019, 19 minutes) and PLAY†PREY: A Gospel, (2021, 12 minutes). This screening constitutes the second program in the three-part What are you afraid of?, curated by Daniella Brito and taking place at e-flux Screening Room in February and March 2023. For Nile Harris, childhood pleasure and play haunts the present day. The artist repeatedly uses a bounce castle, saturated in cheerful reds and yellows, to build anxiety and tension. Through the repetitive and laborious act of jumping, Harris embodies the push and pull of the everyday, leaving the viewer to crave release. Leila Weefur leans into the surreal to stage haunting scenes that fracture the boundaries between fantasy and reality. This slippage is notable in the works Between Beauty and Horror and PLAY†PREY: A Gospel. In the former, crushed blackberries stain and splatter as they’re lathered onto human body parts like blood. In the latter, a bible, suspended in blackness rotates with menacing restraint amid lit white candles. Read more on the films and event here.
Saturday, February 18, 2023, 5pm
Agnieszka Polska: Between the Real and the Imaginary
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In her body of work, Agnieszka Polska challenges conventions of prevalent visual representations and encourages viewers to engage in a critical examination of their own perception of the surrounding world. Through her distinct use of animation and computer-generated images, Polska navigates the boundaries between past and present, physical and virtual, real and imaginary, creating a dream-like cinematic space that is both familiar and strange. A selection of Polska’s moving-image works from 2010 to the present will address cultural and political issues such as the complexities of historical memory, the impact of technology on our lives, and the deepening of the environmental crisis. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation with Agnieszka Polska. The event is organized in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York. More details on the films and event will be added here.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023, 7pm
Screening of Straub-Huillet’s Class Relations, with a talk by Annett Busch
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In Class Relations (1983, 130 minutes), Straub-Huillet’s brilliant distillation of Franz Kafka’s incomplete first novel Amerika is perhaps the most authentically German treatment of Kafka ever made. An ecstatic and haunted fever-induced dream of the United States—the place where Kafka longed to disappear, if only in his imagination—Amerika is told from the perspective of a young German immigrant who encounters a strange new world, with its violent lies and quixotic optimism, like a modern-day Parsifal. Straub and Huillet took pains to render the German mannerisms and dialect of Kafka’s novel faithfully, and shot their film almost entirely in the port city of Hamburg. The film will be preceded by a talk by writer and curator Annett Busch. The evening constitutes the opening event of “Communities, Labor, and Class Relations,” the third chapter of the four-part series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. Read more on the event here.
Tuesday, February 23, 2023, 7pm
Album launch: Dorit Chrysler, Calder Plays Theremin
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Join us for the launch of Dorit Chrysler’s new album Calder Plays Theremin (Fridman Gallery and NY Theremin Society, 2023), featuring a live performance by Chrysler with visuals by the collective Optipus (Bradley Eros, Lary 7, Rachael Guma, and Richard Sylvarnes), and a Q&A with Chrysler moderated by Cara Manes. Dorit Chrysler is a Berlin-based composer and sound artist, and co-founder of the NY Theremin Society. Her work explores new applications of the theremin instrument in various mediums. She has been awarded the Austrian State Stipend in Composition 2023 and earned her Master’s Degree of Musicology in Vienna. Chrysler has performed worldwide (e.g. Coachella, Roskilde, Lincoln Center) and has written for film and the theater. Her compositions have been collected by the Guggenheim and Moderna Museet. Read more on the event here.
Saturday, February 25, 2023, 5pm
Double screening and discussion: Marwa Arsanios and Nele Wohlatz
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This double screening playfully explores linguistic and filmic ways in which care and solidarity can be manifested. Both films featured in this program offer distinct perspectives on the complexities of self-identity and resistance within minor collectives (film extras, immigrants, migrant workers) exposed to institutional and cultural barriers within the dominant economic system. Featuring Marwa Arsanios’s Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love (2019, 25 minutes), and Nele Wohlatz’s The Future Perfect (2016, 65 minutes), and a hybrid post-screening discussion with the artists. The evening constitutes the second event of “Communities, Labor, and Class Relations,” the third chapter of the four-part series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. Read more on the event here.
Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 7pm
Technological Ecologies
Screening and discussion with World Records, Onyeka Igwe, and Laura Huertas Millán
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This screening and discussion accompanies the publication of World RecordsVolume 7: Technological Ecologies, edited by Counter Encounters Collective (Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, Rachael Rakes). Inspired by sites where nature and culture, the organic and the scientific, the human and the more-than-human merge in ways that threaten to dislodge these binaries altogether, this issue thinks through the frame of technological ecologies, which analyzes and contests the division between the ecological and the technological in an array of audiovisual practices. Join us for a screening of Jeannette Muñoz, Strata of Natural History (2012), Mileidy Orozco Domicó, Mu Drua (2011), and Syma Tariq, Partitioned Listening: I hear (colonial) voices (2022); and a discussion with issue guest editors and Counter Encounters members Onyeka Igwe and Laura Huertas Millán, moderated by World Recordseditor Jason Fox. The event is co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture, and History. Read more on the films and event here.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our events mailing list here.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [at] 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 event space and this bathroom.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
