HYPERVISIBILITIES has been developed in dialogue with Sondra Perry, and brings together the work and voices of activists, artists, cultural critics and public intellectuals to consider how art and activism are shaping one another as visual materials are recontextualized and recirculated at increasingly accelerated rates. Friday, October 6th, here at UnionDocs we will screen works by video artists and filmmakers who use found footage to show the manifold identities of Blackness as they are expanded and flattened in contemporary culture. This program was selected by Sondra Perry in collaboration with UnionDocs and Curator, Amanda Parmer of The Vera List Center.

A meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.

A masterful convergence of found footage that traces African-American identity through a vast spectrum of contemporary imagery.

By placing himself and others as viewer of videos that surface of the death and harassment of Black citizens by law enforcement, Green questions our expectations.

Through the lens of the Alien movie franchise— one which has been providing allegories of colonialism and mutability for decades—Perry’s work asks: how do agents of power behave when their subjects become absolutely unpredictable, fluidly inhabiting societal norms in order to destroy them? How can these defiantly multiplicitous subjects be watched? And how is veracity redefined by this surveillance?

Ramos’ astute deconstruction of television news focuses on the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters, and his personal involvement with the issue. Ramos, who had served an eighteen-month prison sentence for draft resistence, was interviewed by New York news reporter Gabe Pressman. Using repetition and juxtaposition, he contrasts the unedited interview footage — and patronizing comments of the news crew — with Pressman’s final televised news report. In his ironic manipulation of the material, Ramos exposes the illusion and artifice of television news.

In Black Celebration, Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in urban black neighborhoods in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create an incisive counter-reading.

Sondra Perry is a media artist whose work investigates the role of digital technology in the systemic oppression of black identity, often centering on the way blackness influences technology and image making. Perry explores the duality of intelligence and seductivity in the contexts of black family heritage, black history, and black femininity.

Ja’Tovia M. Gary (Dallas, TX. 1984) is an artist and filmmaker currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Gary’s work confronts traditional notions of representation, race, gender, sexuality, and power. Gary is concerned with charting the various ways raced and gendered subjects navigate popular media. The artist earned her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from a private for-profit art school in New York City.

James T. Green is an artist and radio producer in Brooklyn, NY by way of Chicago, IL.