FRIDAY 19 SEPTEMBER | 20:00 | SCREENING | PARALLEL WORLDS

Pierre Lefrançois Vérove films the night watchmen and guards who, night after night, peer into the darkness. Vanja Sandell Billström and Lucia Pagano refer to discrete mathematics, creating improvisational situations. Tirtza Even captures the cracks - of not seeing and being invisible - at the heart of intimate exchanges. Sam Drake portrays Los Angeles as a paradise lost, but also a nerve center of ecological dread. David Kelley's work is inspired by poet Muriel Rukeyser's “The Book of the Dead”, which quotes workers affected by industrial disaster. Morgan Quaintance examines the passage of time and the processes of dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary geological level.

Pierre Lefrançois Vérove: Vigile | Exp. fiction | 4k | colour | 0:12:28 | France | 2023

When night falls, the city exists only in halos. Vigil or guardian, you must keep watch among the shadows, confusing tiredness with sleep, night after night, scrutinising the darkness even if it means opening a breach in it and stirring the invisible.

Biography

Pierre Lefrançois Vérove was born in 1989 and lives in Montreuil (France). He studied at the National school of art of Paris-Cergy before joining Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts in 2021. His works, films and texts focus on the visible or invisible margins and those who inhabit them. A consideration that led him to explore the field of institutional psychotherapy (“La chambre de Paul”, 2022) or to follow European borders from Paris to the island of Lesbos in Greece (“Algèbre”, 2019).

Vanja Sandell Billström, Lucia Pagano: Discrete Mathematics | Exp. fiction | 4k | colour | 0:15:20 | Sweden | 202

A passage between two buildings, a nail salon, a stairwell, a badminton hall, an atrium, a hospital culvert. Life takes place. With the small details of existence in focus, rather than the larger narratives and conflicts, fragments are connected to a possible outcome. In mathematics, the word discrete is used to describe objects that are not continuous and separated from each other. Discrete mathematics is applied in a number of different areas such as encryption, databases, game theory, graph theory and algorithms.

Biography

Lucia Pagano and Vanja Sandell Billström were educated at the Lodz Film School and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. “Discrete Mathematics” is their second film as a duo which further explores methods developed in their previous film “Park”, which was nominated to the Best Swedish Short at Göteborg Film Festival 2020, Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film Award, and winner of the Tempo Sound Award the same year. Previously they have shown their work at festivals and art venues around the world.

Tirtza Even: Parallel, Work in progress demo | Exp. documentary | hdv | colour | 0:10:00 | USA | 2024

“Parallel” (work in progress) tells the story of the fissure–the modes of blindness and longing, of not seeing and being unseen, of being together yet also apart–at the heart of an intimate exchange. The installation is constructed of an elongated strip of portraits which can be viewed from both front and back. On either side of the installation are displayed close-up faces of a range of individuals. Each of the individuals stares at a parallel figure sitting across from them, their back to the camera. The parallel figure’s face is visible from the reverse side of the installation, as is the back of the person we saw on the front side.

Beyond the more immediate scene of the gaze exchange between the figures, we can see, through cracks in the wall behind them, a hint of an open landscape.

At an almost undetectable speed, the two rows of portraits–those who are facing us and those who are not–drift along, and then off of the edge of the screen. New pairs continue to slip in endlessly.

The pace of the rows’ drift (front and back), however, is slightly mismatched. This gap in the rate of their movement results in a subtle dissonance: the parallel figures slip away from each other as well as away from us. As they drift, they intermittently obscure the individuals they face. Short texts–segments of online messages written to an unknown other–are, at irregular intervals, read out loud by one of the visible characters. The same text might be performed by different people. Several distinct texts might be read by a few characters at once. The link between who we see and the story we associate with them is, thus, like their image, unsettled, interrupted and displaced.

Biography

An experimental documentary maker for over twenty years, Tirtza Even has produced work which ranges from feature-length documentaries to multi-channel installation and interactive video work, and which, relying on almost imperceptible digital manipulation of slow and extended moments, aims to depict the less overt manifestations of complex, and at times extreme, social/political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others).

Even’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Canada and Europe, including Doc Fortnight at MoMA, NY, Rotterdam Film Festival, RIDM Film Festival, Montreal, New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center.

Tirtza Even has won numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Visual Arts and Next Level Awards, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Award, Media Arts Award, the Jerome Foundation, Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY) and the Jewish Museum (NY) among others. Even has been an invited guest at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, Open Doc Lab at MIT, SXSW Interactive Conference, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia and others. Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France and Video Data Bank (VDB). Even is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.

Sam Drake: Terminal Island | Exp. documentary | 16mm | colour | 0:12:51 | USA | 2024

Tracing a space between real and phantasmatic ecological dread, Terminal Island presents a multi-sensory portrait of a landscape in peril, an ambivalent lament for LA’s vanishing palms and a sermon on Doomsday infrastructure delivered to no one.

Biography

Sam Drake (USA) is a filmmaker based in Milwaukee, WI. Working with 16mm film and found media, her work embraces collage as a framework for interrogating contemporary life and landscapes. She received a BFA in Film from Wright State University, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Cinema Arts. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals and venues including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Doc Fortnight (MoMA), Media City Film Festival, ExiS, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, CROSSROADS, Non-Syntax Experimental Image, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image, and Antimatter. She is currently a lecturer in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

David Kelley: Non Human | Video | 4k | colour | 0:10:34 | USA | 2022

“Non Human” is a film inspired by the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s documentary poem, “The Book of the Dead”, which she wrote using direct quotations of workers effected by the Hawk’s Nest industrial catastrophe in West Virginia in the 1930’s. Like Rukeyser’s poem, “Non Human” makes use of documentary sources: the workers' testimony, Rukeyser’s poetry, and critical race theory to train a generative A.I. that served as a chance aggregator of these archives. “Non Human” then engages five artist/poets collaborators — York Chang, Marcus Civin, Tia-Simone Gardner, Viet Le, and Yvonne Rainer, as collaborators to adapt the generative A.I.’s language into their own discrete poems. These poems formed the script for “Non Human”, which was filmed in Southwest Vermont among disused marble quarries, artists’ studios, and a hospital. Performed by non-actors, the film addresses the same larger subjects of Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” — extractive capitalism, anti-Black racism, and environmental destruction.

Biography

David Kelley is an artist working with photography, video, and installation. His recent projects draw attention to the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. Influenced by a range of visual traditions, Kelley draws upon elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema. By working at the intersection of these strategies, he encourages an understanding of his subjects that is simultaneously direct and speculative.

His work has been shown in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Fotofest Biennial, Houston. Other exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, The Bank in Shanghai, the de Cordova Biennial in Boston, BAK in Utrecht, MAAP space in Australia, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok.

Kelley received a Master of Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine, and was a 2010 -11 resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is currently based in Los Angeles, California, and is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at University of Southern California.

Morgan Quaintance: Efforts of Nature | Video | 16mm | colour | 0:19:00 | United Kingdom | 2023

Combining low resolution footage, 16mm film and satellite imagery, Efforts of Nature considers the passage of time, processes of change and dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary level of shifting geological conditions.

Biography

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami.

His practice remains open and responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, Afro-Caribbean, East Asian and British histories, and the built environment are all mainstays.

He is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. He was the 2023 IFFR Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards; the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg; in 2021, the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, USA; the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; the UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal; in 2020, the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, Denmark and the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal .

Over the past fourteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape and influence the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate. A key reference here is his 2017 text “The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression”. From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based, broadcast radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM. The post-broadcast archive of over 100 interviews can be found here, and includes in depth conversations with Carolee Schneemann, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Jean Fisher, Andrea Fraser, Kathleen Daniel and Billy Woodberry.