Where is the cutting edge of the motion picture? Discover it first at MoMA. Building upon the Museum's long tradition of exploring cinematic experimentation, Modern Mondays is a showcase for innovation on screen. Engage with contemporary filmmakers and moving image artists, and rediscover landmark works that changed the way we experience film and media.
Organized by the Department of Film and the Department of Media and Performance Art.
Modern Mondays is supported in part by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
Related Film Screenings
Upcoming
Past
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 Amie Siegel
As a prelude to Kino! 2010, MoMA presents Amie Siegel’s DDR/DDR (2008), a film essay about contemporary life in the former DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, better known as East Germany). Born in Chicago in 1974, Siegel graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College before heading to Berlin on the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogram. There, she has created a number of distinguished installations and single-screen moving image pieces. Many of these works, which she refers to as “cine constellations,” examine the nature of objectivity and historical memory.
An Evening with Jill Magid
Jill Magid’s (American, b. 1973) performance-based work involves immersing herself in systems of authority, building relationships with police and Secret Service agents in order to explore issues of vulnerability, observation, and trust. For this evening, Magid will present a performance, The Redacted Manuscript, based on her experiences working with the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD). Commissioned by the AIVD in 2005 to create an artwork for their headquarters, Magid immersed herself in the agency’s methods, using the tactics of the organization to conduct interviews with and collect personal information on AIVD undercover agents. Surprised by her ability to penetrate the organization to such depths, the agency censored many of the resultant artworks, including redacting a substantial portion of Magid’s manuscript for a novel based on her experience. In a dramatic conclusion to the AIVD commission, the original version of her manuscript was confiscated by the Dutch Ministry of Interior while it was on view in her exhibition at Tate Modern in 2009. Magid’s performance of The Redacted Manuscript will be followed by a Q&A with the artist. The cast includes Jill Magid, Charlie Kevin, Patricia Buckley, Justin Reinsilber, and Ed Vas.
An Evening with Barbara Hammer
Barbara Hammer presents previously unknown works from her archive, concentrating on performance, photography, and installation pieces, and discusses some of the lesser-known and hidden aspects of her practice. The evening includes a reprise of some of her plays on gender and identity, including her role as Bob Hammer in Tender Fictions (1995), and other performance-related projects like Homage to Sappho (1978), Put a Lesbian in the Whitehouse (1979), Available Space (1979), Changing the Shape of Film, Moving Projector, and Balloon Projection (all 2009).
An Evening with Josiah McElheny, Stephen Prina, and Lynne Tillman
Modern Mondays presents a surprising and provocative pairing of recent films—Stephen Prina’s The Way He Always Wanted It II (2008) and the U.S. premiere of Josiah McElheny’s Island Universe (2008)—that share a fascination with mid-century modernist design and the interplay of architecture, music, and the moving image. McElheny’s Island Universe, with an original score by Paul Schütze, is an incandescent and conceptually rigorous consideration of the origins of the universe as embodied in J. & L. Lobmeyr's famed Space Age chandeliers for New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Prina’s The Way He Always Wanted It II, which belongs to a constellation of works under the same name (photographs, watercolors, a video installation, and an unrealized sound installation from 1979), tracks its way through the domestic interior and snowy exterior of the architect Bruce Goff’s 1947 Ford House in Aurora, Illinois, with a score that Prina arranged and performed from fragments of Goff’s own musical compositions and private correspondence. Following the screening, which will be introduced by MoMA Associate Film Curator Joshua Siegel, McElheny and Prina will take part in an onstage conversation moderated by the novelist and critic Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, A Comedy and the forthcoming short-story collection Someday This Will Be Funny.
An Evening with Steve Paxton
When experimental dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton (American, b. 1939) developed Contact Improvisation in 1972, he indelibly transformed the vocabulary of dance. His movement technique—influenced by his studies in the martial arts and based on ideas of improvisation, gravity, and momentum between two bodies—has significantly influenced contemporary approaches to dance and physical movement. Paxton, who still actively teaches and writes, is widely regarded today as one of the most influential choreographers of his generation.
An Evening with Alejandro Jodorowsky
As a coda to the exhibition of his work that took place at MoMA PS1 earlier this year, Alejandro Jodorowsky (Chilean, b. 1929) introduces his visionary 1973 film The Holy Mountain. Following the screening, which is presented in conjunction with To Save and Project, Jodorowsky will take part in an onstage conversation with Klaus Biesenbach, Director, MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art; and Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. The Holy Mountain is a surreal and picaresque satire depicting the journey of a Christ-like figure, the Thief, to a symbolic mountain. Jodorowsky immersed his actors in months of preparatory spiritual and occult exercises, and was also responsible for the costumes and set designs, and for cowriting the musical score. A quintessential cult film, The Holy Mountain famously played for 16 straight months at New York’s Waverly Theater. Special thanks to ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. Program 150 min.
An Evening with Zefrey Throwell
New York–based artist Zefrey Throwell uses film, painting, and performance to convey his vision of modern America and highlight "the failure of communication" in our age. Active in art circles since 2003, Throwell recently came to prominence through his performance/protest piece Ocularpation: Wall Street, which foreshadowed the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests, and the subsequent global expansion of the "Occupy" movement. In this stirring call for more transparency on Wall Street, Throwell and 49 collaborators dressed up as employees of various Wall Street businesses, and then stripped off their costumes to reveal their naked bodies. The five-minute performance, staged in August 2011, now comes to MoMA as a short film directed by Throwell that "reveals" the events of that morning. Ocularpation: Wall Street will be screened along with a number of Throwell's other films, including a film of his original statement against "cubicle enslavement," Ocularpation: One – San Francisco.
An Evening with Juan Daniel F. Molero
Juan Daniel F. Molero presents the New York premiere of his “neurological feature,” Reminiscencias (Reminiscences) (2010), which explores identity, autobiography, and the creation and loss of memory. A young man suffering from amnesia uses 8mm home movies and videos from his cell phone to puzzle out his own history. Is this dramatic process reality, or is it a canny fiction? The screening is followed by a discussion.
An Evening with Ron English
New York–based American artist Ron English (b. 1966, Dallas, TX) has been described as a “pop pervert and prankster.” Infamous for his subversive use of pirated billboards, this seminal figure in street art and the “culture-jamming” movement exploits familiar brand imagery and advertising in photorealist paintings and art actions that critique contemporary consumer culture. Past works include unauthorized murals at the Berlin Wall’s Checkpoint Charlie in 1989 and on the Palestinian separation wall in the West Bank in 2007, and the Abraham Obama project in 2008. This evening includes Pedro Carvajal’s 2005 documentary feature Propaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English, and a sampling of English’s recent moving image works, including the “Detroit project” from his ongoing video-posting series. After the screening, English will engage in a discussion with Paper magazine editor Carlo McCormick.
An Evening with Phil Collins
In his films, photographs, installations, and live events, Phil Collins explores the nuances of social relations in various locations and global communities. He often subverts the conventions of photojournalism to focus on the inherent contradictions of individual and collective systems of representation. Dissecting the political and aesthetic implications of popular visual formats, Collins’s works indicate that the meaning of a picture—be it still or moving—resides neither in its form nor in its subject-matter, but rather in the transferences it establishes between the producer, the subject, and the viewer. Throughout, Collins maintains a combination of critical consciousness, immediacy, and the recognition of the camera’s ambivalent potential as an agent of both emancipation and exploitation, desire and betrayal. For this Modern Mondays discussion, Collins presents a selection of his works, including how to make a refugee (1999), dunia tak akan mendengar (2007), zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) (2008), use! value! exchange! (2010), and marxism today (prologue) (2010).
An Evening with Mark Boulos
In conjunction with his MoMA exhibition Projects 97: Mark Boulos, artist and filmmaker Mark Boulos (b. 1975), will join us to discuss his practice. Boulos’s work explores beliefs that are held with such transcendent fervor that they are capable of transforming one’s perception of the world. Focusing on political and religious conviction, he investigates the processes through which ideas take material form in day-to-day society. Using this approach, Boulos has conducted firsthand research by observing such radical political organizations as the Philippine revolutionary New People’s Army and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Boulos’s experience living with this latter group, who fight the exploitation of the Niger Delta by large oil corporations, is explored in his video installation All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008), which will be on view in MoMA’s Projects gallery through July 16.
An Evening with Michael Snow
The legendary film/media-maker, visual artist, musician, and unconventional storyteller Michael Snow (Canadian, b. 1928) views his own work in terms of longstanding themes—transparency, temporal abstraction, formation through layering, discontinuity, framing, and the active role of the perceiver. Snow joins us to discuss two of his slide installations that were recently acquired by the Museum. In Slidelength (1969–71), hands holding rectangular sheets of colored plastic, canted and tilted at angles, create geometric and prismatic patterns that recall electrified variations of color and texture. Sink (1970) articulates how any physical subject (in this case, the paint-splattered slop sink in Snow’s studio) is “reduced” to patterns of light when projected. Program 90 min.
An Evening with My Barbarian
The Los Angeles–based performance collective My Barbarian—Malik Gaines (b. Visalia, California, 1973), Jade Gordon (b. Santa Rosa, California, 1975), and Alexandro Segade (b. San Diego, California, 1973)—combine their eclectic background in theater, theory, and contemporary art to create incisive, campy, site-specific plays, concerts, theatrical situations, and video installations. All three group members will be present to discuss their most recent works. Presented in conjunction with the Words in the World performance program. Program 90 min.
An Evening with Adam Pendleton and Lorraine O’Grady
Over the past half decade Adam Pendleton (b. Richmond, Virginia, 1984) has created language-based silkscreens, videos, and performances that critically investigate issues of identity, queerness, and power structures, using appropriated images, texts, and cultural clichés from a broad range of sources to re-imagine political and social realities. In his series Black Dada (2008–ongoing) and System of Display (2008–ongoing), he “associates” the figures of poets and Conceptual artists while repeatedly staging dialogues between 20th-century avant-gardes and the history of black politics. Lorraine O’Grady (American, b. 1934) is an artist and critic whose installations, performances, and texts address issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. O’Grady first rose to prominence with her guerilla performances as Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), in which she invaded art openings dressed in debutante white, giving away flowers, beating herself with a whip, and shouting out verses that highlighted the segregated nature of the art world. Pendleton presents a live “portrait” of O'Grady through a scripted conversation that upends normative uses of language and the re-presentation of O’Grady’s work.
An Evening with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne
In conjunction with their installation 9 Scripts from a Nation at War—a recent MoMA acquisition that is currently on view in the Media Gallery—the artists Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne join us to discuss the work and their collaborative practice. Program 90 min.
An Evening with Kader Attia
Kader Attia (French, b. 1970) studied both philosophy and fine art in Paris and attended Barcelona’s School of Applied Arts and Crafts. A childhood spent moving between France and Algeria has had a profound impact on his work, which examines identity conflicts and the complex relations between East and West. In his two-channel slide projection Open Your Eyes (2010), on view in the exhibition Performing Histories (1), the artist tackles the evolution of Modern Western aesthetics through the issue of repair to the human body, and compares it with notions of repair in the traditional non-Occidental world. Attia discusses his MoMA installation and his continuing research and artistic practice. 90 min.
An Evening with Dorit Margreiter
Dorit Margreiter (Austrian, b. 1967) has developed an artistic practice that examines how art, architecture, design, film, electronic media, and performance correspond and relate to one another. Her widely renowned installation zentrum (2004–11)— currently on view in the exhibition Performing Histories (1)—unfolds over a period of time in various mediums, including a 16mm film installation, typography, and posters. The work revisits modernity’s relationship with the moving image and design. For this evening, Margreiter discusses the context and evolution of zentrum, which was recently acquired by MoMA. 90 min.
An Evening with Wael Shawky
Wael Shawky’s (Egyptian, b. 1971) multidisciplinary practice explores, in novel and pertinent ways, transitional events in the politics, culture, and religion of the Arab World. Following a screening of his video Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo (2012)—the second of four planned installments inspired by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf’s seminal 1983 book The Crusades through Arab Eyes—the artist joins us to discuss the project. In this installment, which covers the 46 years from the end of the First Crusade, in 1099, to the beginning of the Second Crusade, in 1147, a cast of marionettes, representing actual historical figures, enacts Shawky’s highly original approach to staging and filming history. Structured in acts, the work translates historical documents and facts into musical numbers and Grand Guignol performances, creating a surreal, mythical atmosphere. This perplexing, evocative story blends drama and irony to highlight how these remote historical events cou ld hardly be more topical today.
An Evening with Martha Rosler
For her first solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, multimedia and performance artist Martha Rosler presents her work Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, a large-scale version of the classic American garage sale, in which second-hand goods and castoffs are organized, displayed, and sold by the artist in MoMA’s Marron Atrium. For this evening, the artist joins curator Sabine Breitwieser in a discussion about the context and development of this work, which premiered as Monumental Garage Sale in the art gallery of the University of California, San Diego, in 1973. The Monumental Garage Sale will be discussed along with additional, recently acquired works by the artist, such as the photo-and-audio installation She Sees in Herself a New Woman Every Day (1976), on view in MoMA’s Media Gallery as part of the exhibition Performing Histories (1).
An Evening with Lillian Schwartz
New York–based artist Lillian Schwartz (b. 1927) became a pioneer of computer-generated art in the late 1960s while a resident at Bell Laboratories, where she continued working as an artist, filmmaker, and art historian for over three decades. She was among the first American artists to employ computer language to create motion-graphics-based film and video art. Schwartz joins us to introduce a selection of her technically complex, finely executed investigations into visual perception. The program includes 2-D/3-D films from the 1970s to the present, such as Pixillation (1970), UFOs (1971), Enigma (1973), Olympiad (1973), and the newly released Before, Before (2012). Program approx. 90 min.
An Evening with Laura Parnes
Brooklyn-based artist Laura Parnes blurs the lines between narrative film and video art, storytelling conventions and experimentation. This evening’s program centers on her recent cross-platform digital film County Down (2012), in which an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community coincides with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. Mirroring rave culture and the unbridled optimism surrounding technology during the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically embraces its own destruction. Program approx. 90 min.
An Evening with Charles Atlas
New York–based media artist Charles Atlas (American, b. 1949) discusses his creative development, the intertwining of social scenes and art, and his preoccupation with process. Since the early 1970s, Atlas has collaborated with artists, musicians, and dancers—Merce Cunningham, Antony and the Johnsons, Michael Clark, and Mika Tajima, to name just a few—to create films, video installations, and live events that explore “in-between states of identity.” He discusses his recent work, including Joints Array (2011), Ocean (2011), and, most recently, 143652 (2012), in which numbers move across a wall-sized projection as if in a digital ballet.
An Evening with the Otolith Group
Founding Otolith Group members Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun discuss their newest work.
The Radiant
2012. Great Britain. The Otolith Group. 64 min.
An Evening with Deimantas Narkevicius
Originally trained as a sculptor, Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius (b. 1964) mainly works in film and video to explore history with a contemporary, subjective point of view. The Department of Media and Performance Art recently acquired Narkevicius’s seminal work Once in the XX Century (2004), which is currently on view in the exhibition Performing Histories (1). Once in the XX Century is based on video documentation of the removal of a monumental public sculpture of Lenin in Lithuania in 1991. The artist acquired footage from the Lithuanian National TV archive and from a freelance video reporter in order to have a two-camera perspective on the event. By creating a filmic historical reversal, Narkevicius ironically points to the repetition of scenes in history, with regard to the longing for or denial of certain political and economic systems. For this event, the artist presents his films from the 1990s, along with his most recent works.
An Evening with Emmanuelle Demoris
In conjunction with the exhibition of her five-film Mafrouza cycle, Emmanuelle Demoris joins us to screen additional scenes that didn’t appear in the films, and to discuss her experience during two years living and filming in Mafrouza. Beginning with her first meetings with the neighborhood’s residents, Demoris recounts her method for capturing their stories and discovering each film’s particular narrative arc—a wedding, a flood, women’s dreams and aspirations, birth, and religious differences. Remarkable in its open-ended inclusiveness, Demoris’s Mafrouza project allowed for a particularly intimate view of everyday life in the neighborhood, not only recording but sharing residents’ lives without any preconceived interpretation. Demoris has created a complex, compassionate portrait of remarkable individuals and their extraordinary lives. The presentation concludes with a conversation between Demoris and Aaron Cutler, critic and Programming Aide, São Paulo International Film Festival.
An Evening with Xavier Dolan
Since his 2009 feature debut, J’ai tué ma mere, which he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in, Xavier Dolan (Canadian, b. 1989) has been acclaimed as the wunderkind of Canadian cinema. Dolan’s films investigate the grit and passion of contemporary relationships against the backdrop of urban life, often in Dolan’s hometown of Montreal. In conjunction with Canadian Front 2013, Dolan joins Rajendra Roy and Indiewire's Peter Knegt to discuss past work and filmic inspirations, and to present an excerpt from his current project, Tom à la ferme.
An Evening with David Lamelas
Born in 1946 in Buenos Aires, David Lamelas has been a key figure of the Conceptual art avant-garde since the 1960s. His early structuralist films and media installations of the 1960s and 1970s are particularly important in their innovative treatment of time and space, and his work has been highly influential upon a later generation of artists. Lamelas represented Argentina at the 9th Sao Paulo Biennial In 1967 and at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1968 with the seminal work Office of Information about the Vietnam War on Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio, which was recently acquired by the Department of Media and Performance Art. For this evening, Lamelas will discuss the piece and his oeuvre as a whole.
An Evening with Jean-Gabriel Périot
Over the past 15 years Jean-Gabriel Périot (French, b. 1974) has perfected an innovative filmmaking approach by focusing on archival editing. Moving image and photographic archives make up the raw material of his short films, which are edited to create impressionistic narratives, typically aided by compelling soundtracks. Périot’s work, which is distinguished by an intense, emotional approach to contemporary and historic political themes, has been honored with several prizes and has been exhibited worldwide. For this event, his first U.S. appearance, Périot presents approximately 10 of his short films, many of which are New York premieres.
An Evening with Charles Simonds
Since the beginning of the 1970s, New York–based artist Charles Simonds (American, b. 1945) has developed a unique practice at the intersection of sculpture, performance, street art, activism, and utopian city planning. Addressing the condition of being human through its fundamental relation to Earth and the built environment, Simonds’s work is an inquiry into building as a way of thinking and architecture as an indicator of who we are. As a young man, Simonds built miniature "dwellings" in gutters and crevasses of buildings in Manhattan’s Lower East Side—habitats for the Little People, an imaginary population whose history, sociology, and beliefs Simonds documented in films and writing. In addition to footage of these dwellings, films of rituals enacted by the artist, at the core of the artist’s mythology, will be screened, followed by a presentation by Simonds of his practice at large.
An Evening with Carolee Schneemann
Originally a painter, Carolee Schneemann is a pioneer of extended media, from her choreography for the Judson Dance Theater (1962–63) to the sensuous group ritual performance Meat Joy (1964), her self-shot erotic film Fuses (1965), and the anti–Vietman War “kinetic theater” of Snows (1965). Schneemann joins us to discuss these works and her more recent multichannel video installations in relation to MoMA’s recent acquisition of a 1976 version of Up To and Including Her Limits. This work of extended drawing was enacted as Schneemann was suspended nude in a tree surgeon’s harness for over eight hours. Sustained drawings occurred for over six years in various spaces, including The Kitchen in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, and various locations in Europe.
An Evening with Saul Levine
For nearly 50 years, Saul Levine (American, b. 1943) has made experimental films that are distinguished by their machine-gun rhythms, political urgencies, and moments of cloistered, even blissful, family settings. Levine’s is a cinema of violent juxtaposition—Charlie Chaplin hotly pursued and Walter Cronkite intoning the grim news of the day; Vietnam War paratroopers and B.B. King playing the blues; street protests, police roundups, and workers on the dole.
Tracing a vital aspect of Levine’s work across four decades—what P. Adams Sitney has identified as “his incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy” —this special co-presentation of Modern Mondays and To Save and Project: The 10th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation features the New York premiere of Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: This May Be the Last Time (2011), Levine’s meditation on the play of winter light on Boston’s Charles River; and luminous 8mm, Super-8, and 16mm prints of The Big Stick/An Old Reel (1967–73), Notes of an Early Fall (1976), Unemployment Portrayal Note (1980), and Notes after Long Silence (1984–89) that have been beautifully preserved by Bill Brand/BB Optics, with partial funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Inspired by jazz improvisation, Jewish mysticism, visual punning, and poetic meter, as well as the films of Stan Brakhage and Sergei Eisenstein, Levine’s editing ricochets between shock montage and more tender, abstract passages. Through his use of repetition, superimposition, and fragmentation; accidents of exposure, and raw, jagged splicing, Levine creates jarring collisions among television news broadcasts, slapstick comedies, lyrical contemplations of the natural world, and intimate scenes of domesticity and eroticism. Program approx. 80 min.
An Evening with Kerry Tribe
Kerry Tribe (American, b. 1973) uses the formal mechanics of the moving image to explore the instability of recall and the subjective nature of perception. This evening culminates in a live performance of Tribe’s Critical Mass, based on the 1971 Hollis Frampton film of the same name. In Frampton’s film, an improvised argument between a young man and woman is captured, copied, cut up, and reassembled to produce a frenetically edited, highly structural, distanced yet evocative work. Tribe’s piece reenacts Frampton’s film cut-by-cut with two live actors, inverting the role of film as performance document while exploring the historical specificity of language and gender. The performance has undergone a series of evolutions since it was first staged at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2010; this will be the New York premiere of the new iteration, with actors Emelie O’Hara and Nick Huff.
An Evening with J. P. Sniadecki
Yumen
2013. China/USA. Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao, J. P. Sniadecki. 65 min.
