Films by Leila Weefur and Nile Harris

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, February 16 at 7pm for films by multidisciplinary artists Leila Weefur and Nile Harris. 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. Read more on the series here. 

For performance artist 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. 

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. Something as innocuous, yet, temptatious as fruit is a visual reminder of violence and guilt. In the latter, a bible, suspended in blackness rotates with menacing restraint amid lit white candles. Through this chilling iconography, practices like worship and ritual become nightmarish seances that converge collective trauma with ravenous lust.

Nile Harris, fill it with air (call it self care) (2021, 20 minutes)
Made in collaboration with performer Malcolm-x Betts and sound designers slowdanger, fill it with air (call it self care) sets an improvised physical score by Harris inside of a sound-responsive bounce castle. Interweaving sonic feedback as a malleable material, the unique vocal utterances of the cast create a biometrically unique musical composition that cannot be repeated.

Leila Weefur, Between Beauty and Horror (2019, 19 minutes)
Between Beauty and Horror explores the symbiotic nature of beauty and horror as an intrinsic part of the Black experience. The work engages the senses by using the blackberry fruit as a metaphor for Black being, and explores the lived experiences that show up in the shadows of terror only to reveal themselves as a gifts in disguise. It posits abjection, violence, and eroticism as the ingredients that make up the “between” and are considered to be the binding agents of beauty and horror.

Leila Weefur, PLAY†PREY: A Gospel (2021, 12 minutes)
A queer Black child pens a letter to God, reflecting on their relationship to power, the Church, and their past and future selves. PLAY†PREY explores the playful impulses, innocence, and underlying violence implicated in the experience of queer Black children in the Christian Church.

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.