Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome back a profoundly rigorous artistic practice to the screen here at UnionDocs and spend the night focusing on the multivalent work of Sabine Gruffat!

Beyond Resolution: Films by Sabine Gruffat, is a touring program spanning her expansive body of work from 2007 to 2025. It’s always a huge honor to spotlight Gruffat’s genre-defying and formally adventurous practice, which continually invites new ways of thinking about experimentation, technology, process, and systems of representation.

This series of films favors ambiguity and resists resolution. The nearer the gaze, the more obscure the view. Illegibility here is not an escape from politics, but a way of inhabiting it differently: as a site of tension, friction, and possibility.

These films draw from a range of genres and layered techniques. Images are processed to draw attention to the hidden logics in software, hardware, and materiality. In repurposing media, the works call attention to the histories from which meaning’s fragile frameworks emerge.

We’re so excited to share Sabine’s work with first-time viewers and longtime fans on this special evening dedicated to her ever-evolving body of work. We hope you’ll join us in welcoming her and joining for a conversation following the program as she tours this exciting new program.

Come through!

Program

Disclaimer

Marseille, FR. 2025. 5 mins. Digital Video.

The following film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen.

Headlines: BOMB PARTS

Detroit, MI. 2007, 3 mins. 16mm master negative transferred to digital.

A semi-automated animation process of a New York Times article results in sentence recombinations that sometimes made sense while emphasizing certain words and images. The writing from February 27, 2007 is about bomb parts found in Baghdad that the newspaper speculates were planted by Iran. 

A Return to the Return to Reason

Chapel Hill, NC. 2014, 3 mins. Laser etched BW 35mm film.

A tribute to Man Ray’s 1923 film Le Retour à La Raison. In this film Man Ray’s “original” film was digitized with its scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered image that the laser engraver may etch onto black film leader.

Brave New World

Chapel Hill, NC. 2015, 7 mins. 35mm Film transferred to HD.

In 1927 Henry Ford bought land in the Amazon for a rubber plantation and called it Fordlandia. In this video, 35mm archival silent documentary film footage shot by Henry Ford’s own filmmakers is reworked and given a soundtrack revealing the colonial lens through which the filmmakers apprehended unfamiliar nature.

Black Oval White

Owego, NY. 2009, 3 mins. Mini DV/DVCAM transferred to digital.

A video recording of a computer-generated abstract animation that is keyed, wiped and matted by electronic oscillators and feedback. The sound of the electronic oscillators is delayed and pitched to produce modulations.

Take it Down

Chapel Hill, NC. 2019, 12.5 mins. Solarized color positive 35mm film.

A last stand for the silent guardians of the old order. Take It Down is a filmic day of reckoning for the Old Confederate South. What is up must come down, like the Confederate soldier monuments standing in court house squares across the South. Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives.

Framelines

Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, NC. 2017, 10 mins. Laser-etched Color Negative transferred to Digital.

Framelines is an abstract scratch film made by laser etching abstract patterns on the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms then contact printed. The soundtrack layers the noise made by the etched optical track.

Moving or Being Moved

Chapel Hill, NC. 2021, 11 mins. Digital Video, 3D Animation, and Motion Capture.

Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.

Souvenir Statuette

Ménerbes, FR and Sante Fe, NM. 2024, 11 mins. Digital Video, 3D Animation, and MoCap.

Souvenirs of souvenirs. Souvenir Statuettes were animated in real spaces with a custom made augmented-reality application. Whether they be cast from a mold, or 3d scanned and propagated online, Souvenir Statuettes aim for virality. Some of the quasi-objects in this video were once objects, others are non-objects or computer model imaginaries.

Program Duration: 65 mins

Bios

Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She co-founded and co-programs the Cosmic Rays Film Festival in Chapel Hill, NC with filmmaker Bill Brown. Currently she lives in Marseille, France. 

Sabine Gruffat works on experimental, animation, and essay forms and exhibits her work as installations, performances, and single-channel screenings. By actively engaging with both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat’s work questions our standardized and mediated world.

Sabine Gruffat’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Migrating Forms, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Chicago Underground, Cinéma du Réel, 25FPS, Transmediale in Berlin, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.  She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York. Her collected video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago, IL.