An Evening with Wolfgang Staehle

Wolfgang Staehle—founder of The Thing, an online community made up of dozens of members’ websites, mailing lists, and an online community forum of artists, writers, programmers, curators, and political activists—discusses his recent installation A Matter of Time, the fifth in a series of works based on live video streams and chronophotography. Staehle’s streaming projects began in 1996 with a dusk-to-dawn view of the Empire State Building projected live in Karlsruhe, Germany. Other sites have included the Fernsehturm in Berlin and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian rainforest. Each installation draws attention to time—a one-to-one, linear time; a simulative "real time"; or the contrivance of frozen time.

In Conversation: An Evening with John Cale

John Cale (Welsh, b. 1942), artist, musician, sonic innovator, and a founding member of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground, reflects upon the liaison between music and art. The evening includes a discussion of his recent work Dyddiau Du (Dark Days) (2009), currently on view in the Wales Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The installation exemplifies the multivalent nature of contemporary media art. The event, which is held in conjunction with the MoMA exhibition Looking at Music: Side 2, will be moderated by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art.

An Evening with Alfredo Jaar

In conjunction with MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, 2010, renowned artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar presents the U.S. premiere of his most recent short film Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini) (2009), which was produced in conjunction with a series of related art projects. A tribute to the brilliant Italian filmmaker, intellectual, poet, critic, and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Ashes of Pasolini incorporates footage from Pasolini’s films and rare interviews conducted prior to his sudden and mysterious death in 1975. The title refers to Pasolini’s own poem “Le Ceneri di Gramsci,” itself a eulogy to the Italian left-wing intellectual Antonio Gramsci.

Jaar, who lives and works in New York, was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956. His work has been shown extensively in international biennials and solo and group exhibitions, and he frequently stages “public interventions” that bring to light injustice in the world.

An Evening with Marina Abramović

Abramović hosts a conversation about preparations for her MoMA exhibition Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. In particular, the artist speaks about “reperformance” as legacy and the future of performance art. The discussion is moderated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and MoMA Chief Curator at Large.

An Evening with Joseph DeLappe

Digital media artist and activist Joseph DeLappe has worked in new media since 1983, and in online, computer-game-based interventionist performance art since 2001. His recent projects include dead-in-iraq (2007), wherein he enters the name of each American military casualty from the war in Iraq into the popular U.S. government–funded “America’s Army” computer game; and The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi’s March to Dandi in Second Life (2008), for which he created a “mixed-reality” durational performance utilizing a converted exercise treadmill to reenact Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March. DeLappe discusses his continuing projects at the intersection of art and activism.

An Evening with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

New York–based artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (b. Great Britain, 1950) has been testing the limits and conventions of music, language, art, and identity for almost forty years. As a founding member of the seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge made music history. More recently, in collaboration with his partner Lady Jaye, the artist started an ongoing experiment in body modification aimed at creating one “pandrogynous” being. For this discussion, P-Orridge focuses on works created with the 1970s British avant-garde performance collective COUM Transmissions. The group’s collaboration culminated in the 1976 retrospective PROSTITUTION at London’s I.C.A. Gallery, which was vehemently attacked by the press and even debated in British Parliament. P-Orridge will show rare footage and images of COUM’s performances. Please note: This program may contain explicit material.

An Evening with Michael Haneke

Haneke introduces Funny Games (1997), the final film in his retrospective.

Funny Games 

1997. Austria. Michael Haneke. 108 min.

An Evening with Kevin Everson

For just over ten years, Kevin Jerome Everson (Charlottesville, Virginia) has been making films about the working-class culture of black Americans and people of African descent. He has completed a prodigious number of works, including two features and over forty short 16mm, 35mm, and digital films. Born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, Everson frequently records family, friends, and life in the Midwest, but he has also developed art projects in Rome and elsewhere. His films look for the art in everyday life, revealing people's relationship to their crafts and focusing on the conditions, tasks, gestures, and materials in communities. Much of Everson's recent work is inspired by found footage. He manipulates news and sports footage, old films, still photographs, and image files in various ways, subtly repositioning or restaging actions and movements to highlight or shift the original emphasis. This presentation includes Emergency Needs (2007), based on a press conference with Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes; Something Else (2007), an interview with Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia, 1971; and several premieres of shorts.

An Evening with Ernie Gehr

Ernie Gehr discusses two structuralist masterpieces separated by twenty years—Serene Velocity (1970) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991)—and relates them to his interest in pre-cinema objects and the artists who invented a "cinema of attractions," as evidenced in Gehr's works in Panoramas of the Moving Image.

Serene Velocity 

1970. USA. Ernie Gehr. 23 min.

Side/Walk/Shuttle 

1991. USA. Ernie Gehr. 41 min.

Valerie 

2006. Germany. Birgit Moeller. 85 min.

An Evening with Michael Sporn

The artist takes part in a conversation with animation historian/filmmaker John Canemaker and MoMA assistant curator Joshua Siegel. The discussion is illustrated with clips from Sporn's award-winning animated films, including a new short, Pab's First Burger, and an excerpt from his feature-length work-in-progress about the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. Sporn's career is also traced through his commercials, public service announcements, title sequences, and visuals for the Broadway stage.

An evening with Ronald Bronstein

Filmmaker Ronald Bronstein introduces a screening of his new film, Frownland.

Frownland 

2007. USA. Ronald Bronstein. 106 min.

An Evening with Joshua Mosley

Philadelphia artist Joshua Mosley uses stop-motion animation to explore communication and the ways in which technology complicates it. He presents recent work, including Dread (2007). Installed at the fifty-second Venice Biennale, the work is a morality play in which the worlds of thought, imagination, and the subconscious are conjured and easy conclusions are forestalled. An animated photographic forest is the background against which two characters—French philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal—hold a conversation on the relationship between God-given natural order, free will, and the human and animal conditions.

An Evening with Lida Abdul

Lida Abdul uses diverse media to explore such concepts as obliteration, erasure, and loss of roots. In Clapping with Stones (2005), men knock together stones that were produced by the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, making a sound that evokes both destruction and construction. Born in Kabul in 1973, Abdul was forced to flee Afghanistan, living in political asylum centers for five years before moving to the U.S. She now resides in both the U.S. and Afghanistan.

An Evening with Mario Rizzi

The moving image artist Mario Rizzi (b. 1962, Barletta, Italy) makes both single-screen projections and multiscreen installations. Although his base is Turin, Rizzi often takes up residence outside Italy in communities experiencing significant change. There, the artist patiently observes and films individuals coping with transformations within their societies.

Murat ve Ismail (Murat and Ismail)

2005. Turkey. Mario Rizzi. 60 min.

An Evening with Barbara Caspar

Barbara Caspar (b. 1979, Graz, Austria) studied philosophy, psychology, art, and (with Michael Haneke as a professor) film.

Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? 

2007. Austria/Germany. Barbara Caspar. Approx. 90 min.

An Evening with Jeffrey Jeturian

Toward the end of The Bet Collector's weeklong run as part of Global Lens, 2008, the director discusses his technique and his work in relation to Filipino cinema.

Kubrador (The Bet Collector)

2006. Philippines. Jeffrey Jeturian. 98 min.

An Evening with Pascale Ferran

Ferran introduces her adaptation of Lady Chatterley (2006).

Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois (Lady Chatterley)

2006. France/Belgium. Pascale Ferran. 168 min.

An Evening with Antonio Campos and Cinéfondation

In conjunction with Cinéfondation, Cannes 2007, the Department of Film presents a discussion with Antonio Campos, whose film Buy It Now (2004, USA) was awarded first prize in the 2005 Cinéfondation competition in Cannes. The 2007 Cinéfondation-winning films will be screened during this event, along with Buy It Now.

An Evening with Andrea Geyer: Spiral Lands_Chapter 2

Via a slide lecture, multimedia artist Geyer explores the scholar's role in the critical examination of the relationship between land and identity, and the ways in which this relationship frames and determines our (mis)understanding of the contemporary U.S. Taking the American Southwest as an example, her extensive photographic and textual historiography progresses nonlinearly from historic encounters to current situations.

An Evening with Sharon Hayes: On Politics and Desire

Hayes moves between multiple mediums—sound, performance, video, and installation—in an ongoing investigation of the intersections of history, politics, and speech. Her works draw on fictional narratives and interrogations of "real world" narratives, such as the rhetoric of Presidential addresses or the audiotapes made by Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hayes presents her most recent work, which focuses on the conditions of public speech and public opinion, and on the complicated relationship between politics and desire.

An Evening with Yeondoo Jung

Yeondoo Jung (Korean, b. 1969) is a photo and moving image artist whose feature-length silent work Documentary Nostalgia (2007) is quietly astonishing. Named by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul as artist of the year, Jung imagines his own biography as a series of colorful and elaborate locations that "flow" into one another. Shot in one static, unbroken take, like those found in very early film, Documentary Nostalgia records the transformation of six dense sets (room, rice field, city street, pasture, etc.) into a final cloud-capped summit. The fixed camera observes a carefully choreographed team of workers and actors changing scenes, donning costumes, and even leading cows to graze as the artist's own life swirls by. It is at once a riff on reality, a dreamy performance piece, and a genuine work of cinema.

An Evening with Akram Zaatari

Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari interweaves documentary and personal narrative to examine the complicated social, political, and cultural issues of a country shaped by extended territorial conflict. His videos and installations speak of the contradictions of everyday life within regions of conflict further fragmented by media. Al Yaoum (This Day) chronicles thirty years of Lebanon, and in How I Love You, five Lebanese men speak about their passions and relationships. Presented in conjunction with Asian Contemporary Art Week. For more information, visit www.acaw.net.

An Evening with Kazuhiro Soda

The filmmaker introduces his debut feature, Campaign, as part of Contemporasian. The film will also be shown on April 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13, with no filmmaker introduction.

Senkyo (Campaign)

2007. Japan. Kazuhiro Soda. 119 min.

Synthetic Times: Media Art Now

To complement the exhibition Synthetic Times—Media Art China 2008, a Cultural Olympics project opening at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in June 2008, media artists debate issues revolving around the exhibition's themes: Beyond Body; Emotive Digital; The Recombinant Reality; and Here, There, and Everywhere. With NAMOC director Fan Dian; artists Miao Xiaochun and Xu Bing; exhibition producer Li Zhenghua; and curator Zhang Ga. This event kicks off a pre-exhibition symposium (April 15) held at Parsons, the New School for Design, and eyebeam, in collaboration with the National Art Museum of China. For details visit www.mediartchina.org.

An Evening with Kalup Linzy

Kalup Linzy (b. Stuckey, FL; lives Brooklyn, NY) is best known for the performance-based videos that he has written, directed, edited, and performed in professionally since 1990. Adopting the styles and narratives of American television soap operas, Hollywood tearjerkers and romance films, Spanish-language novellas, and Nigerian video melodramas, Linzy satirically deconstructs themes of sexuality and gender, race, class, and pop culture. The soundtracks are pre-recorded and lip-synched and the characters—sublimely cast with a range of engaging professional and nonprofessional performers—are frequently played in drag. Linzy himself plays the starring role and often performs the voice-overs for the other characters. His videos and performances are popularly received on YouTube and MySpace, on broadcast radio, and in galleries and museums worldwide.

The program includes highlights from Linzy's song-based videos, including Lollypop (2006), As da Artworld Might Turn (2006), and Melody Set Me Free (2007). Also included are two premieres: How Katessa Got Her Groove Back (2008), a satirical short based on the film How Stella Got Her Groove Back; and SweetBerry Sonnet (2008), a work in progress.

An Evening with Karen Yasinsky

Karen Yasinksy (b. Pittsburgh, PA; lives Baltimore, MD) makes short animated films based on beautifully rendered clay-modeled figures and drawings. To create these works, the artist works alone on each aspect of the story—drawing and modeling, sets and costume design, direction, cinematography, and stop-animation shooting. The musical soundtracks are made in collaboration with composer Winston Rice and others. Her twelve-inch-tall clay figures, with hand-painted faces and hand-stitched clothing, move minimally within small, simple sets. The characters are silent, the expression on their faces static, and their bodies move in small gestures. The result is compelling and realistic, partially due to the fact that the characters' stories are developed as Yasinsky shoots the stop-motion animation. The figures reflect a soulful playfulness reminiscent of Buster Keaton.

Filmmakers are a major influence on Yasinksy, and she has reconstructed the characters and narratives of several films. A recent five-part series (based on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante) uses several animation techniques to explore different aspects of the lovers' relationship and includes a haunting six-minute black-and-white film, La Nuit (2007). Her Au Hasard Balthazar (2008), based on Robert Bresson's eponymous film, premieres at the Museum. The program also features earlier works, including Boys (2002), Animal Behavior (2003), and No Place Like Home #1 and #2 (1999).

Peter Hutton in Conversation with Luc Sante

To open his MoMA retrospective, Peter Hutton presents New York Portrait, Part I (1978–79) and Skagafjördur (2002–04) as part of a special conversation with Luc Sante, visiting professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College, and author of Low Life, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings.

LoVid: Wire-full

LoVid is the New York–based interdisciplinary artist duo Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Their work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. They combine many opposing elements, contrasting hard electronics and soft patchworks; handmade items and machine-produced objects; and analog and digital. This multidirectional approach is reflected in the content of their work, simultaneously romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. The artists present their performance Help Carry a Tune (2007) and perform with their Sync Armonica synthesizer.

An Evening with Olga Chernysheva

Moscow-based Russian artist Olga Chernysheva, a graduate of the Moscow Cinema Academy and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, captures quotidian life in contemporary, post-Communist Russia using video, photography, drawing, and painting. For this presentation, Chernysheva discusses her artistic practice in the context of Russia today, and shows several of her video works. In The Train (2003), the director's camera traverses the cars of an intercity Moscow train; Anonymous (2004) portrays a middle-aged woman and a drunken man each having a private moment in a public park; and March (2005) captures the dynamics between young male cadets, scantily clad teenage cheerleaders, and band members performing before a corporate event. The program also includes her newest video, Untitled. After Sengai (2008). Special thanks to Foxy Production, New York.

An Evening with Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce, whose lively, gay-themed feature narratives like No Skin Off My Ass (1992), Hustler White (1996), and The Raspberry Reich (2004) helped establish and affirm the punk Homocore movement, makes films with an aggressively light touch. Based in Toronto and a co-creator of the queer zine J.D.s, LaBruce brings an energetically cartoonish vision to his films, transforming their radicalism into provocative entertainment.

Otto, or Up with Dead People 

2007. Germany/Canada. Bruce LaBruce. 95 min.

An Evening with Susan Hiller

The American-born, London-based artist Susan Hiller creates works across a range of mediums, from installation and video art to photography, performance, and writing. She describes her art as a kind of "archaeological investigation, uncovering something to make a different kind of sense of it." Her latest work, The Last Silent Movie (2008), brings attention to the unexplored recorded archives of extinct and endangered languages, rebroadcasting "lost" voices that poignantly continue to speak. The work revives the words and voices of people who are presumably no longer living, unearthing some of the ghosts that haunt these musty sound recordings. The voices sing, tell stories, and recite vocabulary lists, and some, directly or indirectly, accuse us of injustice. Hiller's short film Belshazzar's Feast (1983) will also be screened.

An Evening with Pipilotti Rist

In anticipation of the opening of Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), a monumental commission for the Museum's second-floor atrium, the artist takes part in a conversation with Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of Media, about her video, sound, and sculptural installations. Many of her earliest videos were made with the experimental klezmer-punk-pop band Les Reines Prochaines, of which she was a member from 1988 to 1994. In the early 1990s, Rist began experimenting with various forms of electronic media. In 2005 she represented Switzerland at the fifty-first Venice Biennale, where she presented Homo sapiens sapiens (2005), an expansive video projected onto the ceiling of the San Stae church. For her upcoming installation at MoMA, Rist re-envisions the architecture and use of space in the Museum's atrium by creating a lush, immersive landscape shaped by images, sound, and sculptural elements.

The Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Nominee Panel

The five nominees for this year's Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award gather for a panel discussion illustrated with film clips.

Thurston Moore Introduces Early Music Videos by David Bowie

Event details and ticketing information

Thurston Moore Introduces Early Music Videos by David Bowie

Held in celebration of the recent gift from the David Bowie Archive of music videos to the Museum, this program presents a special selection of works by the celebrated musician, actor, and producer. Bowie, who began playing the saxophone when he was thirteen years old, worked as a commercial artist before studying mime and, later, playing in bands. In 1969 he co-founded Beckenham Arts Lab in South London, a crucible for experimentation that hosted artist studios, poetry readings, and events such as light shows, theatrical and dance performances, and puppet shows. For several of his videos, Bowie collaborated with the photographer and filmmaker Mick Rock, best known for his photos of 1970s glam and punk icons including Iggy Pop, Queen, the Ramones, Lou Reed, and the Sex Pistols. Thurston Moore, of the "No Wave" band Sonic Youth, provides commentary throughout the program.

An Evening with Lonnie van Brummelen

Lonnie van Brummelen (b. 1969, Soest, The Netherlands) studied art at Rietveld Academie and Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Initially trained as a painter, Van Brummelen began working with film at the end of the 1990s. Since 2001, she has collaborated with Siebren de Haan on thought-provoking site-specific exhibition projects and essays. The artist's recent work Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (2007) combines sculpture and 16mm film in an exploration of subsidized economies, the global sugar market, and how artistic practice can disrupt and subvert economic policies. In response to anti-competitive policies set by the European Union to protect its native sugar production and to the detrimental impact these policies have on other countries, Van Brummelen and De Haan decided to stage an intervention. They subverted EU restrictions on sugar importation by using European sugar dumped cheaply into Nigeria to create sculptures, then returning it to Europe as an artistic product. This screening and discussion with the artist is presented in collaboration with apexart International Residency program.

Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers 

2007. The Netherlands. Lonnie van Brummelen, in collaboration with Siebren de Haan. 63 min.

An Evening with Anthony McCall

The central formal element underlying Anthony McCall's fusion of sculpture and cinema is durational structure. In this program, McCall discusses his recent projects within the context of his early work, expanding on the idea of durational drawing (in 2008 he reenacted the 1974 work Five-Minute Drawing at the artist-run exhibition space Orchard). Influenced by music scores, flow charts, storyboards, and architectural projections, his "solid light" installations are always initially developed through drawing; he also does the reverse, producing studies after a work has been realized. McCall discusses the relationship between the drawn line and the projection beam—representations of time and volumetric form on paper. McCall's work is currently presented in Anthony McCall: Elements for a Retrospective (Utzon Center, Aalborg, Denmark, previously at the Serpentine Gallery, London) and Anthony McCall (Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris), in addition to the following group exhibitions: Notation: Calculation and Form in the Arts (Akademie Der Kunste, Berlin), Cinema Indeed: Narratives & Projections (Itaú Cultural Center, São Paulo), Singapore Biennial 2008, and Seeing Double (Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne).

An Evening with Jesper Just

Since beginning to work with film and video in 2000, Jesper Just (b. Denmark, 1974) has created a boldly stylized body of work that straddles the boundaries between performance art, installation, and cinema. Just's work challenges conventional views of gender and sexuality, blurs the line between fantasy and reality, and, like the work of Michaelangelo Antonioni, explores the intense psychological (dis)connect between body and space. His protagonists navigate both highly aestheticized interiors marked with expressionistic shadows, and lush, naturalistic exteriors. Like Maya Deren in At Land, these characters are physically, emotionally, and psychologically alienated from the world around them. Conventional gender roles and notions of behavior are the true villains in Just's work; his heroes are those who are able—however momentarily—to overcome their inhibitions and turn repressive environments into highly emotive performance spaces.

Just’s latest trilogy of films, A Voyage in Dwelling, A Room of One's Own, and A Question of Silence (all 2008), illustrate his expanding artistic vision. In contrast to his earlier, stand-alone pieces, this narrative cycle is linked by the female protagonist's journey through incessantly mutating spaces, culminating in an ecstatic moment of self-discovery. With these films, Just continues to expand the boundaries of his style, his lucid imagery floating further into the realm of dreamscape. MoMA presents the world premiere of the full trilogy in a theatrical setting. Followed by a discussion with the artist led by Giuliana Bruno, professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. Bruno's book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for "world's best book on the moving image." Her Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1993) won the Kovács prize for best book in film studies. Her latest book is Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT Press in 2007).

An Evening with Miroslaw Balka

Warsaw-based artist Miroslaw Balka (b. Otwock, Poland, 1958) presents and discusses his video and installation projects Sundays Kill More; Postcards; Mapping the Studio, Too (all 2008); Bottom (1999/2003); and Bambi (from Winterreise) (2003). These works deal with both personal and collective memories, especially as they relate to the artist's Catholic upbringing and the cumulative experience of Poland's fractured history. Through this investigation of domestic memories and public catastrophe, Balka explores how subjective traumas are translated into collective histories, and vice versa. His materials are everyday objects, but the resulting works resonate with ritual, hidden memories, and the legacy of the Nazi occupation of Poland. This program is presented in association with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.

An Evening with John Gianvito

Filmmaker John Gianvito introduces his latest film, presented as part of Documentary Fortnight 2009. Following the screening, Gianvito will engage in a discussion with Marita Sturken, professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural studies, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of several books, including Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind 

2007. USA. John Gianvito. 58 min.

An Evening with Guido van der Werve

Dutch artist Guido van der Werve introduces the premiere of his latest video, Number 12 (2009), which "evolves" around a chessboard that also functions as a piano. The video was shot in Manhattan's Marshall Chess Club, on Mount St. Helens, and on the San Andreas fault line. The work, which features a score composed and played by the artist, concludes in a curious stalemate. Van der Werve belongs to a long line of artists who have trudged off into the wilderness in order to portray new visions of their world. For his Number 8 (2007), for example, he filmed himself slowly walking across the frozen Baltic Sea, mere steps in front of a massive icebreaker ship as it steamed relentlessly ahead. Born in 1977 near Rotterdam, van der Werve's interdisciplinary background includes classical piano, electric guitar, industrial design, archaeology, performance, and film.

An Evening with Jan Sikl and Ivan Passer

Jan Sikl opens the exhibition of his Czech film series Private Century with a screening of the episode Daddy and Lili "Marlene," followed by a conversation with Ivan Passer.

Tatícek a Lili "Marlén" (Daddy and Lili "Marlene")

2007. Czech Republic. Jan Sikl. 52 min.

An Evening with Tehching Hsieh

Artist Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950, Taiwan) gives a talk in conjunction with the exhibition Performance 1: Tehching Hsieh, the inaugural installation in an ongoing series that brings performance documentation, original performance pieces, and live reenactments of historic performances to various locations throughout the Museum. The artist will show highlights of the stunning and versatile visual documentations he made of his durational performances, the last of which, Thirteen Year Plan, was completed in 1999. In a conversation with Adrian Heathfield, professor of performance and visual culture at Roehampton University, London, Hsieh will address the fundamental concept of lived duration in his oeuvre, and how the forceful resilience and rigorous lengths of his performances challenge the conventional division of artistic and lived time.

An Evening with Julius Ziz

Julius Ziz (Lithuanian, b. 1970) liberates cinema from its theatrical underpinnings, elevating it with a poetic vision at once singular and beautiful. Stories spin off like whirling flanges of plot from conventional narrative, and the films rely on rhythm to suggest what the mind knows in a preconscious manner. It is this "capturing" of thought before its articulation that makes a Ziz experience resonant and valuable. Ziz graduated from the Film Academy in Tbilisi before moving to New York, where he worked with Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives. In addition to making films, Ziz writes for the theater.

Vilkas (The Wolf)

2008. Lithuania. Julius Ziz. 20 min.

The Window 

1999. USA. Julius Ziz. 19 min.

Et le cochon fut né (And the Pig Was Born)

2001. USA. Julius Ziz. 23 min.

An Evening with Carter

New York–based artist and filmmaker Carter (b. 1970) introduces the U.S. premiere of his most recent film, Erased James Franco (2008), and takes part in a post-screening conversation with its star, James Franco. Recalling the intellectual gamesmanship of Robert Rauschenberg's 1953 drawing Erased de Kooning, from which it derives its title, Erased James Franco is simultaneously a study of the craft of acting and of the fracturing—and reconstitution—of narrative and identity. While filmmakers in recent years have attempted shot-for-shot remakes of existing films—most notably Gus Van Sant with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Haneke with his own Funny Games—the emphasis here is on a single actor, alone on stage, recreating iconic film performances that have been stripped of their original context. In addition to reenacting scenes from several of his own past film roles, Franco also reinterprets a pair of haunting portrayals of psychic disintegration and renewal: Julianne Moore's role in Todd Haynes's Safe and Rock Hudson's in John Frankenheimer's Seconds. Denied the charged interplay with other actors, Franco adopts a strangely flat affect, imbuing the film with a quality that Carter describes as "like bloodletting or a kind of cleansing…a building up and tearing down, simultaneously." Courtesy Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris.

An Evening with Sterling Ruby

Los Angeles–based artist Sterling Ruby (German, b. 1972) is known for totemic resin forms, intentionally defaced Minimalist sculptures, and membrane-like ceramics. He also works with video and photography, drawing inspiration from graffiti, science fiction, institutional architecture, and antiquity. Ruby's work tackles aesthetic tropes and social stereotypes, using gestures that refer to notions of transience, transgression, and transference. The program includes the premiere of Ruby's recent untitled video from 2009, along with other works including Agoraphobic (2001), Found Cushion Act (2005), Transient Trilogy (2005–09), and Dihedral (2006).

An Evening with Michel Auder

For over forty years Michel Auder (French, b. 1945) has compulsively recorded the events of his life. Embracing a variety of roles—including silent participant, obsessive voyeur, discreet accomplice, and simple observer—he creates brashly self-referential films and videos that have earned him wide renown. Auder's decades-long love affair with the Sony Portapak video system has yielded an epic amount of unsparing, poetic footage delineating the flamboyant life of an art-world dandy. His latest work, The Feature, intercuts selections from Auder's personal video archive with new segments (directed by Andrew Neel) in which Auder's doppelganger (played by Auder himself) learns that he suffers from an incurable disease. The Feature's fictionalized biography intermingles truth, lies, life, and art into an ambiguous self-contained universe. The film illuminates, through the brutal honesty of visual diaries, the artist's experiences in the New York art scene, from wild times at Andy Warhol's Factory to Auder's marriages to Viva and Cindy Sherman. Following the screening, Auder and Neel discuss A Feature and their use of personal archival footage.

An Evening with Mel Chin

Mel Chin (b. 1951) is an internationally celebrated and socially engaged conceptual artist whose work encompasses several disciplines. Already well known for interventions, earthworks, drawings, and works in other mediums, the Texan artist recently turned to filmmaking. In 2007 he completed his first animated work, 9-11/9-11, which confronts a pair of historic September 11s: Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état in Chile, and the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City. The video will be screened twice, and a discussion with the artist and the audience will take place in between.
9-11/9-11. 2007. USA/Chile. Directed by Mel Chin. Screenplay by Chin, Steven Foster. Produced and edited by Chip Schneider. Animation by Planovisual Estudio de Animación, Santiago, from the graphic novel by Ignacio Moreles. With Lili Taylor. Courtesy Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York.

An Evening with Péter Forgács

Budapest-based avant-garde media artist and film director Péter Forgács (Hungarian, b. 1950) is widely acclaimed for his award-winning work using home movies. In 1983 he established the Private Photo and Film Foundation Archive (PPFA), a unique collection of amateur film footage that he uses as the basis for his experimental documentaries. He has received wide recognition for his ongoing Private Hungary series of films exploring the history and legacy of the Hungarian people, and in 2007 he received the Erasmus Award for exceptional contribution to European culture. The artist presents his most recent film, Hunky Blues: The American Dream, about the fate of Hungarian men and women who arrived in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The film was created specially for the event series Extremely Hungary: Art and Culture Beyond Your Expectation.

An Evening with Aernout Mik

On the occasion of the MoMA exhibition Aernout Mik, the first U.S. museum survey of the artist's work, Modern Mondays presents a virtual tour of the eight works spread throughout the Museum. Mik designs, sculpts, and builds constructions that both contain his moving images and engage the body of the spectator, creating a kinesthetic relationship between viewer and viewed. These moving-image installations uniquely meld filmmaking, sculpture, and architecture into an experience that is at once compelling, unsettling, and original. Following a presentation by Laurence Kardish, organizer of the exhibition, Mik will participate in a conversation with MoMA Director Glenn Lowry.

An Evening with Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev

Based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and trained in both film and visual art, Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev produce video installations that encapsulate everyday life in Central Asia, and their work has been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago (2007), the Venice and Singapore biennials, and Winkleman Gallery, New York. Shot along the ancient Silk Road connecting China and Kyrgyzstan with Western markets, the artists' videos portray the resourcefulness that defines this mountainous, poverty-stricken region. In conjunction with Asia Art Week, this program includes their Algorithm of Survival and Hope (2005), along with other recent work.

An Evening with Brody Condon

New York–based artist Brody Condon (b. Mexico, 1974) introduces his Without Sun (2006), a video compilation of “found performances”—online videos of people who recorded themselves while having a psychedelic experience. The screening is followed by a live reenactment of these drug-induced journeys, with an actor mimicking the voices and a dancer matching the body movements. Condon will also discuss Case, his upcoming performance adaptation of William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), which was commissioned by Rhizome and premieres at the New Museum as part of Performa 09. Copresented with Performa 09, with special thanks to Lana Wilson.

An Evening with Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

"The video works of Los Angeles duo Harry Dodge (American, b. 1966) and Stanya Kahn (American, b. 1968) confront the alienation and violence of contemporary American life with absurdist humor. Dodge and Kahn’s collaborative, performance-based videos inhabit an urban L.A. landscape that evokes both the everyday and the post-apocalyptic. In deadpan performances and elliptical narratives, Dodge and Kahn infuse their uncanny visions of contemporary culture with wit, dread, and longing." (Text reprinted courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix.) During their talk the artists screen and discuss works from throughout their careers.

An Evening with Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay (b. 1955, California) trained as a visual artist at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and at Cooper Union in New York while performing as a musician in the late 1970s. Over the last thirty years, Marclay has created an extensive body of work, including collages of music, sculpture, photography, and video. Using a wide array of mediums and materials, Marclay has explored the relationships between sight and sound and the convergence of the visual and the auditory. His work continues to navigate an exchange between these two areas, exploring questions about how sound is created, transformed, remembered, and interpreted. Marclay participates in a discussion of his recent work, including 2822 Records (P.S.1) (1987–2009), a site-specific, floor-based installation of vinyl records that is currently on view at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

An Evening with Dara Friedman

Dara Friedman (German, b. 1968), a moving-image artist who lives and works in Miami, presents her Musical (2008), which was recently acquired by MoMA. This exhilarating “film” exactingly documents a series of singing performances, made possible by the Public Art Fund, that were photographed between September 17 and October 5, 2007, on the streets of midtown Manhattan. In an attempt “to turn the volume up on the song that’s going on in your head as you’re walking down the street,” Friedman invited about sixty ordinary New Yorkers to suddenly, surprisingly break into song—seemingly in mid-stride, whether in the middle of a block or inside a building.

An Evening with Nina Könnemann

Artist Nina Könnemann (German, b. 1971) presents the first New York screenings of her short single-channel moving image works. According to critic Jan Verwoert, Könnemann’s pieces “gently unhinge [viewers’] sense of time and space. No special effects are used, and all the actions shown are real events, none of them what you might call spectacular.” These works deal with disillusionment, the dark side of ecstasy, and the unrequited search for connection and, perhaps, passion. Könnemann concentrates on the “after” of events, celebrating what happens on the sidelines and in the margins, and locating a drama in the otherness of the ordinary. Special thanks to Karin Guenther.

An Evening with Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff’s intensely original work investigates the unconscious processes of the mind and the possibility of graphically recording mental states. Her complex, innovative films and installations can be interpreted as an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imagined, in which the artist acts as a kind of medium, questioning the artistic validity of separating truth and fiction. Beloff will discuss several projects, including The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A.; The Somnambulists, which examines the relationship between hysteria and theater; and her current exhibition at the Coney Island Museum, Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle 1926–1972, which takes as its point of departure Sigmund Freud’s visit to the Coney Island amusement park a century ago. The artist will also screen a selection of “Dream Films” from the exhibition.

An Evening with Jim Finn

A brilliant and wickedly satirical mash-up of documentary, fictionalized restaging, and agitprop, Jim Finn’s The Juche Idea (2008) takes as its inspiration and its target the film theories and principles of self-reliance espoused by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. Absolutist in the extreme, the Dear Leader’s moviemaking edicts were designed to uphold the “monolithic ideology of the Party.” Finn subjects them to withering parody through genre-defying experimental conceits, incorporating scenes from North Korean melodramas and propaganda films dating back to the 1950s, allusions to the 1978 kidnapping of the late South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, and absurdist reenactments of English-language lessons from official textbooks. Robert Koehler in Variety writes, “The evidence that current film-making is brimming with original, standard-breaking creations has to include the work of Jim Finn…. To say that [his] films open up new possibilities for satire, ideas, and language isn’t an overstatement.” Finn also presents two recent short films, Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell (2009) and la loteria (2004–05).