Our bodies belong to others; parents first, then lovers. A mother’s body belongs to her child. We are subjected to education systems; consumer desires demand to be satisfied through contracts of labor. Our bodies belong to institutions; institutions for criminals, the sick, and the insane; institutions in the end too, for all of us, via the medical, care, and funerary systems.
When we agree to participate in films, our bodies belong to the filmmaker. A contractual agreement places the image, sound – and by metaphorical extension – the body, in the ownership of the filmmaker. Its care is entangled with the politics of filmic history and filmic experience. The filmmaker’s own body is also invested, navigating space, time, and the ‘contaminated projections’ of their own ideologies. As we watch carefully, or repeatedly, our knowledge may be ruptured, our feelings disturbed.
In one way or another all the films in this program deal with the mechanisms and technologies of entrapment: the destitute body, the incarcerated body, the body as a self-replicating system, bodies of soldiers performing military rituals, Greek mythology made contemporary through performative acts of defiance. Strategies in the pursuit of ‘realness’ range from injecting humor; others incite horror, follow a performative impulse, or straddle precariously on the ethical tightrope of representation. All point powerfully towards the condition of embodied subjects that have become specular, schizoid, internally disjointed.
Selected by Minou Norouzi, filmmaker and programmer, doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London.
KISS ME, GENTLEMEN
Featuring works by Alexander Lorenz, Nelmarie du Preez, Sirah Foighel, Daniel Mann, Eitan Efrat, Miranda Pennell, Chelsea Knight, Michel Wenzer, Yaron Lapid, Elise Rasmussen.
Total running time: 75 min.
PROGRAM:
Arcadia, downtown Yaron Lapid (Israel 2008) 15’
Complex Sirah Foighel, Daniel Mann, Eitan Efrat (Israel 2008) 9’
Three Poems by Spoon Jackson Michel Wenzer (Sweden 2003) 14’
Von Ordnung der Gesellschaft / Of the Order of Society Alexander Lorenz (Germany 2013) 12’30”
TATTOO Miranda Pennell (UK 2001) 9’
To Stab Nelmarie du Preez (UK 2013) 45”
I Lay Claim to You Chelsea Knight (USA 2009) 4’ 45”
I Am Not a Man, Not Now Elise Rasmussen, Chelsea Knight (USA 2012) 9’
In attendance: Chelsea Knight
FEATURED GUESTS
Chelsea Knight was born in Vermont and lives and works in New York. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Knight completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program (2010) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008), and was a Fulbright Fellow in Italy (2007). Solo exhibitions and performances include: The St. Louis Art Museum; The Brooklyn Museum; Aspect Ratio Gallery (Chicago); Momenta Art (Brooklyn); DiverseWorks (Houston); Night Gallery (LA, with Elise Rasmussen) and Julius Caesar Gallery (Chicago). Knight has exhibited and screened her work in group shows including Nouvelles Vagues at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Anti-Establishment at Bard CCS Hessel Museum (NY); the Young Artists’ Biennial (Bucharest); the 10th Annual Istanbul Biennial; Werkschauhalle Gallery (Leipzig); the Michelangelo Pistoletto Foundation, (Biella, Italy) and Harvard University. Knight was a 2015 VAN artist resident at Project Row Houses (Houston) and is a Spring 2015 Research and Development Artist in Residence at the New Museum (NYC).
Jess Wilcox is Programs Manager at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organizes public programs and has worked on the public artworks Between the Door and the Street a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy and A Butterfly for Brooklyn a pyrotechnic performance by Judy Chicago. She has worked on curatorial projects at Abrons Art Center, the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Performa, SculptureCenter, and Storm King Art Center, among others. Recurring interests of hers are translation, performativity, the choreographic, and personal and political identity.
Minou Norouzi is an Austrian-born Iranian artist working mainly with moving image portraiture. She received her BA from the University of the Arts London, majoring in cinematography, and her MA from Goldsmiths College in 2007. Whilst giving the impression of layered fiction, her video works are routed in documentary practice. Her thematic preoccupation lies in the psychological landscapes of incubated desire, displacement, authoritarianism & surrender, misplaced femininity, often framed within the mundane.
Anatomy of Failure, her first full-length documentary work, premiered in Toronto at Hot Docs in 2008. All Shades of Grey, supported by the British Council, showed at the 55th Oberhausen Festival in Germany. She is a recipient of the TED Fellowship and a AHRC funded Practice-PhD Researcher at Goldsmiths University of London. Minou divides her time between London & Linz.
