This program of short silent films focuses on some different ways in which artists have explored spatiotemporal dimensions of cinema and the pictorial.  By employing or embracing systems of organization, these five films create a rich interplay between order and chaos, inviting the energy and materiality of the physical realm to challenge their attempts to order it.

Born in Jodhpur, India, Shambhavi Kaul lives in the U.S. where she teaches filmmaking at Duke University. As skillful with found footage as with her own gorgeous landscape cinematography and hand-processed 16mm, Kaul’s films are marked by a distinctly pensive but playful character. Kaul’s cinematic constructions conjure uncanny, science-fictive non-places. They present to us other worlds – our natural world becomes surreal, familiar set pieces and settings in found-footage films are revealed to be hollow and eerie, hints of narrative threads appear and recede.

Taking a unique look into the experimental Black Gate Theater, where Kusama performed and staged happenings in New York City in the 1960s, this program will include screenings of Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero and Otto Piene’s The Proliferation of the Sun, as well as never before shown documentary footage.

This program is part of the film series Kusama on Screen.