After a resounding and successful festival run with her last few films including winning prizes at Locarno Film Festival, Zinebi, Abyciné and Aguilar de Campoo Film Festival,  Elena López Riera comes to NYC for a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1.

It is with great pleasure to welcome her to UnionDocs to show an expanded program of recent short films that intermingle observational and essayistic approaches with filmic portraiture to form poetic representations specific to her native coastal town in Southern Spain. Riera’s films nimbly capture microcosms of social and cultural phenomena that resonate widely. She lays bare the complexity of gender and sexuality uncovering the latent complications of regional tradition, ritual, and expectations passed along through intergenerational identities.

After screening her latest film at TIFF’s Wavelengths Andréa Picard noted it as, “Elegant, sly, and finely observed… a fascinating film about men, as much as it is about birds, invokes themes of masculinity and courtship, speaking volumes about intimate, patriarchal village communities along the Mediterranean, where silent physical gestures often convey more than words,”

The film follows one of the most central paloma races from the artist’s hometown, where trainers prepare their birds for a special race won not by the fastest bird, but by the male pigeon who is able to chase and “conquer” a single female one. The race begins with the flight of this female bird, followed by the release of a multicolored, swarming flock of male pigeons in hot pursuit. Riera will also be sharing a sneak peek at her latest project, a work in progress that looks at the concept of litany, as a performative discourse on catholic traditions in Southern Spain. Elena in this work parses the collective voices and rituals of generational expectations for love, desire, family, marriage, and partnership. In this project she engages a queer theoretical discourse to explore the deconstruction of societal gender expectations.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Elena López Riera and MoMA PS1 Assistant Curator Jocelyn Miller.

After years of exile, Rafa returns to his village in the south of Spain and has to face all the ghosts left behind.

Premiered at Director’s Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival, Quinzaine des réalisateurs and Locarno International Film in 2015

A humid summer afternoon in a southern town, a woman peels a rabbit with her hands. The children, the old and the dogs contemplate the daily ritual of death.

Premiered at premiered at the Quinzaine des réalisateurs and Locarno International Film Festival in 2016

Won the Silver Mikeldi Award for best Documentary

Elena López Riera is visual artist and filmmaker from Spain, holding a PHD in Audiovisual
Communication. In 2008 she moved to Switzerland, where she teaches cinema and
comparative literature at Geneva University. She also has worked as a programmer for film
festivals such as Entrevues Belfort (France) , Sevilla European Film Festival (Spain) and
Visions du réel (Switzerland), where she has been a member of the selection committee
since 2017.

Her first short film, Pueblo was premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight of Cannes Film festival,
in 2015 and was selected for more than 20 international festivals. In 2016 her film Las
vísceras was selected at Locarno Film Festival, and received the Mikeldi Silver Award at
Zinebi Film Festival. Her latest film, Los que desean, nominated for the European Film
Awards, won the pardino d’oro at Locarno Film Festival in 2018. Her films have been
screened at prestigious international film festivals such as: Toronto, San Sebastián, Zagreb,
Cinéma du réel, Vila do Conde, Leuven, Mecal, Curtocircuito, Filmadrid, Hiroshima, Rio de
Janeiro, Cali, Rekjiavik, Lincoln Center in New York. Los que desean has been also invited
by Moma PS1 as a part of its spring open house exhibition March-May 2019.
Elena López Riera is also co-founder of lacasinegra, an artists’ collective dedicated to
research and experimentation with new audiovisual devices, with whom she co-directed the
feature film Pas à Genève.

She participated in the first international film seminar of the Tabakalera Art Center, at the
Berlinale Talent Campus, as well as the Ikusmira Berriak residency program of the San
Sebastián Film Festival, the Arché lab of Doc Lisboa festival and at the prestigious
Cinéfondation residence of the Cannes film festival. In 2019 she has her first solo exhibition
at Domium Art Center in Salamanca (Spain). She is currently preparing a video installation
commanded by Art Center Cineteca in Madrid and developing her first feature film, El agua.

Jocelyn Miller is Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1, and has been a member of MoMA PS1’s curatorial team since 2011. She recently organized Projects 106: Martine Syms at The Museum of Modern Art (2017) and Maria Lassnig: New York Films 1970-1980, Body Armor (both 2018); Past Skin (2017); and Meriem Bennani: FLY (2016) at MoMA PS1. She has co-organized solo exhibitions with Reza Abdoh, Naeem Mohaiemen, Ian Cheng, Mark Leckey, Cao Fei and Simon Denny, as well as career retrospectives of the artists Maria Lassnig and James Lee Byars, the latter both at MoMA PS1 and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. She also serves as Editorial Manager for MoMA PS1’s curatorial department, overseeing museum publications, and served as Editor for the 2015 Greater New York: Readers series. She received her BA in Comparative Literature at Princeton University.