On June 1, 2026, e-flux Screening Room presented “Artists’ Cinema Today,” co-organized together with the Brooklyn Film Festival. Following the screening, New York-based curators and programmers Sarah Bex Rice (Brooklyn Film Festival), Ariana Kalliga (Amant), Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti (Microscope Gallery), and Inney Prakash (Prismatic Ground) joined e-flux Film curator Lukas Brasiskis for a public conversation on artists’ cinema, its audiences, and perspectives through which it is understood as it circulates between film festivals and contemporary art institutions. The transcript has been edited for this publication.
Lukas Brasiskis: Thank you all for joining. All of us often program and curate what one can call “artists’ cinema,” yet I think that sometimes we approach it from slightly different positions, so I suggest starting the conversation from the language we use to define the subject of our interest. Do terms such as “artists’ moving image” or “artists’ cinema” come up in your work often, and do you find them useful?
Inney Prakash: I run Prismatic Ground, an experimental film festival, although I usually describe it as centered on the spectrum between experimental documentary and avant-garde film. You could also classify the films I work with as artists' films, but I tend not to. The labels matter less to me than whether works communicate with the intended audience and the filmmakers we want to gather around the festival. Their value lies in signaling that a community will come together around a certain kind of work.
Ariana Kalliga: The question of terminology is an interesting one, particularly when we consider why certain terms gain currency and then fall away or no longer resonate. I come from an exhibition context. I work at Amant, a center for contemporary art in Brooklyn whose campus opened in 2021. There is a real emphasis there on artists who work across disciplines and move continually between different lanes. Thinking about the title “Artists’ Cinema Today,” my initial response would be to describe our programs in terms of moving image, because that allows me to consider the material and historical layers of the works we show. It also speaks to the ways these works respond to exhibition spaces and are not limited to the cinema. I recently came across an edited collection called Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography.1 I like the double meaning of an image that is still moving. A moving image is always in motion, but it can also be a still image, and that stillness is worth thinking about.
Sarah Bex Rice: Beyond the Brooklyn Film Festival, my day job is in the archival field, so I am constantly thinking about reuse and recontextualization. “Experimental” and “artists’ cinema” have always felt somewhat interchangeable to me, and I had not thought much about the distinction. At the Brooklyn Film Festival, the category has always been called “experimental,” which raises many questions. What counts as experimental when it is set in contrast to documentary or narrative? Is it a music video in a film-festival context? A VR film, when VR was becoming more popular? A sketch comedy? A fashion film? When I put on my archival hat, I think, as Ariana does, about materiality and about how unstable any label can be. It also becomes very important to return to the medium and preserve the source format of a film or moving-image artwork. Bringing those two perspectives together here, I feel that one could start thinking about artists’ cinema differently.
Elle Burchill: Andrea Monti and I run a space together, so we are going to figure out how to speak together without taking up twice as much time.
Andrea Monti: We founded Microscope Gallery together in 2010. Both of us had previously worked with film festivals and on various exhibitions with artists as well as in connection with our own practices. At that time, we were frustrated with labels and with the barriers faced by people working between art and film who were both artists and filmmakers. Most of the filmmakers we knew came out of experimental film. The festivals we had worked with were broad in their focus and also showed feature films, but we were most interested in people working in a more poetic and artistic way.
EB: We started a space that tried to break down the barrier between the so-called white cube and the black box. We organize exhibitions, but we also hold screenings because certain works are meant to be screened rather than exhibited. Other works are made to be exhibited, although we like to break down that distinction, too. Sometimes we show work in a context the artist had never considered for it. We combine these approaches, but the starting point is always the artist’s intent.
AM: Personally, I think labels are just labels. For lack of better terms, “artists’ cinema” and “artists’ film” are fine with me. They contain both art and film, and if they are meant to refer to something that sits between those fields, they work. “Moving image” may be more inclusive because it does not evoke the old historical and social separation between cinema and art.
EB: However, if we are talking about cinema, I think commercial work should simply be called commercial work, and the rest of us should get to call what we do cinema. That would be my preference because it is more fun and more open. There is so much one can do with cinema. That is my proposal.
LB: It is an interesting proposal. For years, I have had a problem with the term “experimental cinema” for a simple reason: historically, the term connoted a peripheral or minor position in relation to work produced by the mainstream film industry. But in art spaces, that hierarchy does not make much sense. Artists do not necessarily consider themselves peripheral to Hollywood cinema because the mainstream film industry may simply be irrelevant to their work.
As Elle pointed out, certain works require specific conditions of presentation. How do those conditions affect your conversations with artists, and have you ever felt that a gallery space could not support the kind of attention a particular film required?
AK: We should begin by examining our assumptions about what visitors do in a gallery and what people do in a cinema. At Amant in December, we organized “The Wandering Spectator,” a program of film, performance, and conversation with Giuliana Bruno and other participants who have written extensively on these questions. The program considered the urban wanderer and film spectators’ curiosity and movement, as well as the ways they may transgress the boundaries of the frame established by an exhibition space or cinema.
We should also foreground the artist’s role and agency. Artists are often highly attuned to the limitations of a gallery space and to the specific conditions it presents. I think, for example, of Christelle Oyiri, who was on site for the installation of Hauntology of an OG, the centerpiece of her exhibition at Amant, “Belief May Vary.” Artists may also produce two cuts before sending a film to a gallery, one for theaters and another for exhibitions. Choices about titles and duration, along with the installation manuals that sometimes accompany films, already communicate the artist’s position. There are many conversations to have, but the artist’s presence is important to emphasize.
LB: Can you share an example from your curatorial practice of how the experience of the same work changes when it moves between a cinema and a gallery?
AK: One example is Joyce Joumaa’s Mutable Cycles II, which we screened here at e-flux Screening Room last year as a single-channel work. By contrast, in “Mutable Cycles,” an exhibition I organized at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the work appeared as a six-channel installation, with the screens angled like solar panels. The screens turned on and off at different intervals, creating a lag between them. When people entered the space, they often thought something was wrong with the monitors or waited for them to turn on. The installation created an awareness of the video’s physical operation. In its single-channel presentation at e-flux, the work became more about pacing, time, and slowness, and it was shown in dialogue with Danae Io, whose moving-image work takes a more documentary approach. In the program, the film provided an anthropological lens on landscape. That is one example of how screening and exhibiting the same work can produce different experiences.
LB: Your example raises a broader question about the documentary approach within artists’ cinema. Inney, Prismatic Ground places a strong emphasis on experimental documentary. What, for you, distinguishes this approach from more conventional forms of documentary, and why is it important to the festival?
IP: I came to programming through film festivals rather than the art world. Over time, I realized that I was less interested in films whose primary aim was to convey information than in films in which form shapes how the world is approached and understood. That is what experimental documentary means to me. Prismatic Ground also presents fiction and hybrid films, but this way of thinking about cinema remains central to the program and to the community gathered around the festival.
AM: At Microscope, we present a great deal of documentary-like artists’ work, but we do not necessarily think of it as documentary.
EB: It is an experimental documentary.
AM: Yes, an experimental documentary sounds better. There is something about the nonfiction impulse that feels particularly relevant when we talk about artists’ cinema. That does not mean artists’ films cannot be fiction, but the nonfiction impulse lends itself very directly to artistic expression.
EB: Diaristic and personal films are common in the so-called experimental realm. But I want to return to installation. We recently presented “Navigations,” an exhibition by Peggy Ahwesh. Its five-channel video installation, The Wayfinders, used Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight to create imaginary flights through the eastern Mediterranean, including routes among Beirut, Damascus, the Qalandia airport, and Jerusalem’s Old City. The now-abandoned airport has passed through British, Jordanian, and Israeli control. The simulator’s reconstructions are extremely detailed, so it was possible to see airports and aircraft from the Sixties and to fly through an environment that no longer exists. Ahwesh learned how to navigate this world, but she also broke the game’s rules, flying within city limits and crashing the planes. In the exhibition, she also included photographs she had made in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Syria from as early as 1990. The project began when she was teaching at Al-Quds Bard College in the West Bank and visited the abandoned airport with a friend. She recorded footage there, and that material became the two-channel video Qalandia. The exhibition brought the actual and simulated material together, blurring reality and virtual reality.
LB: This brings us to the question of the public in both the cinema and art worlds. Sarah, when you curate an experimental film program for the Brooklyn Film Festival, do you think about the audience and how the program will meet their expectations?
SBR: I wonder whether the answer has to do with how the films play off one another. As a filmmaker, you can be as intentional as you want about what you create and where you place it in the world. But once a film enters a festival program, you cannot control how it will interact with the film before or after it, how people will perceive it in that space, or what they will carry away. As a programmer, you need a degree of self-deprecation, or even self-hatred, to sit in a theater and watch people respond to something you decided they should see. It is a very emotional process for me because I want it to be an emotional experience for people coming together. Then someone gets up to use the bathroom or says, “I have to leave early”—it creates a hole in me. My intention was to assemble something like a new entity made of many different parts. You know the meme: “I’m showing you my favorite film, and I’m watching you more than the film because I want to see how you respond to that film.” I don’t know whether that directly answers your question, but it is part of my answer.
LB: That feeling is familiar. In today’s attention economy, mass entertainment rarely has to seek out its public, while unconventional art forms depend on viewers being willing to meet them on their own terms.
AK: There is such a wealth of spaces and so much curiosity. We now have so many possibilities for forming publics that, personally, I am not worried about the future of audiences for moving-image work outside of the mainstream cinema.
LB: Yes, but I think the situation is slightly different in contemporary art. I don’t think many people enter a gallery or exhibition and say, “This is too experimental.” Aesthetic experimentation is not understood as an issue in that context, whereas cinema can still provoke that response.
EB: At Microscope, from the beginning, we also held screenings, sometimes as many as four a week. That pace has slowed over the years. You do not necessarily want people in the room who don’t want to be there. If someone comes only to see a friend and has no interest in what is being shown, they may fidget or otherwise disrupt the screening. If you don’t want to be there, go. Sometimes the best screening has only five people in the room because every one of them genuinely wants to see the film.
AM: At the same time, of course, we want our audience to be as varied as possible and to include people from many different backgrounds.
EB: We joke: “Don’t bring your friends.”
AM: Exactly. As Sarah was saying about assembling films into a festival program, the equivalent in a gallery is placing several moving-image works in the same space. That can be difficult because of the light and sound bleed. You want every work to be experienced in the best possible way, but you often have to decide where to compromise.
The great opportunity for an artist showing in a gallery or museum is that, in effect, you get to create your own cinema. You build the entire system through which the work is experienced, which can bring it closer to the artist’s intention. A movie theater, by contrast, is a machine—an apparatus already in place. Ideally, it gives you a large image, great sound, and undivided attention. Undivided attention may be cinema’s greatest gift.
EB: But in an exhibition, you can also watch a work twice, three times, or ten times. Sometimes the more you see it, the more you learn.
LB: That is the ideal gallery visitor ...
IP: As I mentioned, I don’t come from the art world. At the risk of sounding like a philistine, I have often struggled to connect with moving-image work in a gallery or museum. Other things are happening around you; people are coming and going, and visitors may not watch a work all the way through even once. I usually prefer to see the same work in a cinema, although some works clearly function better in a gallery.
When it comes to publics and audiences, however, I have to admit that the people who attend an experimental film festival are a niche audience seeking a niche experience. When an artist exhibits the same film in a gallery or museum, the work reaches a more general audience, and usually far more people. A person who goes to a museum and encounters a moving-image work might not be especially interested in art; they may simply be looking for something to do on a Sunday. So, although I personally prefer the cinema context, galleries and museums can offer greater exposure. My ideal way to experience a large painting might be for all of us to sit in rows and stare at it, but that is not how most people look at paintings.
AK: That also points to the possibilities of the exhibition space. Its audiences can be general or highly specialized, depending on the institution and on the programming organized alongside an exhibition. This is where collaborative models such as e-flux Screening Room come into view. Exhibition spaces partner with e-flux to screen works spanning a broader range of an artist’s trajectory.
LB: Since the Nineties, moving-image installation and single-channel cinema have increasingly intersected. Artists have made more feature films and submitted them to film festivals, while filmmakers ranging from Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman to Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Lucrecia Martel have installed and shown work in contemporary art spaces. Beyond aesthetic concerns, how has this migration between the white cube and the black box changed how artists finance and sustain their moving-image practices?
EB: I’ll say something, although I don’t like this subject. I think that if you are an artist, you simply make your work. As soon as you begin by thinking, “I’m going to make money,” you are done.
LB: What if the issue is not making money from your work, but securing the resources needed to realize a particular film project?
EB: Maybe. But you can make art without a budget. Every artist we work with has, at some point in their career, made no-budget work. Every single one. That is where they started. Older artists began when there was no money, and younger artists now have access to digital cameras. That does not mean they have not gone on to make works with larger budgets, but they are people who have to make work and can do so regardless of the budget. If all their funding disappears, they will still make work. That is an artist to me. What I hate most is when someone says, “I haven’t made the work because I didn’t get a grant,” or “I haven’t been making work because I haven’t received funding in five years.” What? Make work.
AM: Sometimes a budget is needed to fulfill a certain artistic vision. For some artists, selling a work can provide that funding.
EB: That is part of why we started Microscope. We were tired of experimental filmmakers having to be dead before the art world would show their work. In the meantime, many of them were losing their teeth. We wanted to give them a chance before they were dead. I am not joking. This was real, and it still is. So, yes, it is important to create opportunities for artists to sell work, support themselves, and pay the rent. I was talking specifically about whether you make the work at all.
Audience Question: As an artist-filmmaker, I find it frustrating to navigate the field from that in-between position. Most festival submissions, for instance, require a fee. How can the process become more equitable for artists whose works are situated between cinema and art?
SBR: I’ll mention one practice at the Brooklyn Film Festival. Once we have programmed one of your films, you never have to pay a submission fee again. We want to continue supporting filmmakers whose work we have shown and to keep that channel open to them. We also work entirely through submissions. Rather than scouting other festivals’ lineups and soliciting films already selected elsewhere, we give serious consideration to the work sent through our own process. These are small things a festival can do.
IP: When I started Prismatic Ground, two things mattered to me: paying filmmakers and taking submissions seriously. The payment is modest, but many festivals do not pay filmmakers at all, often because resources are limited.
EB: About once a year, we issue a free open call for our event series, and we watch every submission. We also accept online submissions throughout the year and review them periodically. Many galleries say, “Do not send unsolicited submissions.” I cannot stand that—it makes no sense. We have found artists that way and screened work by many people who submitted to us. We also pay the artists we present in our events.
LB: I want to return to the movement of film between galleries and cinemas and discuss its broader effects. What does this migration contribute to the contemporary moving-image ecosystem?
AK: That is a big question. I am thinking about what contemporary art spaces offer the established filmmakers you mentioned earlier—major figures who already have exposure, visibility, and perhaps the means to make big-budget films. But I am also thinking about what contemporary art spaces gain by showing them. I am from Athens, and I think of Onassis Stegi’s recent exhibition “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs.” Lanthimos, who made Dogtooth and several other major films, presented four bodies of photographic work, including black-and-white images made in Greece, and the exhibition coincided with the publication of his photo book VISCIN. These filmmakers are already familiar to audiences. There is an immediacy and currency to the material, and it lends itself to reproduction by a number of institutions that may have more limited means. You can enlarge a film still on a wall, for example. The filmmaker has already accumulated a wealth of visual material and renown, drawing audiences to their talks and other programs. But there are many questions there.
LB: Might greater creative freedom be another factor? In European narrative filmmaking, for example, projects have to pass through layers of pitching, co-production, and script development, with producers and distributors shaping the work at each stage. Can experimental cinema and contemporary art offer artists greater control over the process and over how they realize their aesthetic and sociopolitical intentions?
EB: You may have more freedom in the art world at the beginning because a producer is not checking on you, but there are challenges later when you try to show the work. As we all know, there is censorship in the art world as well, and there are plenty of boards. The censorship comes farther down the line: you may get to make the work as you want, but it may never be shown. At least there is still the future. We all know what has been happening with National Endowment for the Arts grants, with institutions taking fewer risks and work being censored. Perhaps, right now, experimental cinemas and independent artists, like many of us in this room, can still do whatever we want. But not everyone can. These are hard times.
IP: In general, both the art world and the film world have been equally and tremendously disappointing in that regard over the past few years.
SBR: My brain splits in two because licensing is my day job. As an artist interested in making things, I value access to existing archival material, creative reuse, and Creative Commons. But I also represent active and former videographers and filmmakers whose work dates back decades and who may now have outtakes they can monetize through licensing. On the one hand, an artist should be paid when their material is used in a new project. On the other, that new project may not have the budget to license it. Perhaps, as we discussed in the beginning, that is also why diaristic, personal, experimental nonfiction is so prevalent right now. You can draw on your own home movies and your personal archive without encountering the same financial barriers or the risk that you will be unable to screen the film later because you did not clear the material.
AK: A final point concerns the way exhibitions are written about. We often discuss the discourse-driven biennials that emerged in the Nineties, but their film programs are frequently left out of the narrative and go unreviewed, even though that is where much of the critical work happens. We need to think about that history, too.
LB: That is an important point. Art biennials have long had parallel film programs, yet those programs are largely absent from the histories written about those biennials afterward.
Audience Question: I thought that the most important word in the title of today’s event, “Artists’ Cinema Today,” is today. How would you define “expanded cinema” today?
EB: Expanded cinema is something Microscope Gallery has shown from the beginning. It is not a single-channel projection on a screen, nor is it simply a two-channel work. It expands to occupy space and can be projected anywhere, in any way. We mounted an expanded cinema exhibition and, the following year, organized “Dreamlands: Expanded” with the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the exhibition “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016.” We brought back historical works while also presenting contemporary artists working in expanded cinema. We are not the only ones doing this; expanded cinema remains quite active today.
Audience Question: Do you think the definition of expanded cinema should change as film forms change over time?
AM: No. I think it is a simple definition precisely because it is negative, based on what expanded cinema is not: a conventional theatrical screening in which you go to a cinema and watch a film. Instead, I think we now live in times of expanded cinema. Our lives have become expanded cinema. We are constantly looking at videos, and that makes it difficult for an artist to make expanded-cinema work that incorporates new media, because new media already shape the environment we inhabit.
EB: Still, people are pushing it. Artists continue to find new ways to present work using both new and old technologies. Bradley Eros recently presented “Distance Illusions: A Chance Operation” from our roof, projecting 16mm images toward the High Line, 200 or 300 feet away. People held up pieces of white cardboard to catch the images. It was totally underground, guerrilla-style, and people became excited by a gesture as simple as that. A security guard wanted to stop the performance, but thought it was a marriage proposal, so it was allowed to continue. People are always finding different ways to look at this material. Many artists are also working with expanded cinema installations, as you mentioned.
AK: I was thinking about the exhibition currently at the Museum of the Moving Image, “Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body,” and its exploration of X-rays and other imaging technologies in relation to film. Lukas, would you like to say more about how technology shapes expanded cinema today?
LB: I think one aspect we have not mentioned is media archaeology. Bradley’s piece, which Elle brought up, worked so well precisely because of the simplicity of a medium that might have felt obsolete fifteen years ago but now feels refreshing again. Shifts in technology change the production and perception of moving-image art. In the Nineties, 16mm film projection was often discussed in terms of nostalgia; now video, rather than 16mm, appears nostalgic. Perhaps in ten years we will all be talking about digital nostalgia, and video might look interesting and fresh to new generations of artists. These shifts keep expanded cinema alive because it is never quite the same. Perhaps that is the best place to pause the conversation—not with a conclusion, but with questions about what today’s changing conditions of moving-image art will make possible in the future.
Karen Redrobe and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
