Tags: Conversations at the edge

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Basma Alsharif: Doppelgänging

By Marcos Ortega on Fri, 18/04/2014 - 04:20

Basma Alsharif in person!

Basma Alsharif’s sharp, seductive films have often been informed by Palestine’s history, its contemporary political situation, and the conflicted experiences of those who call it home (whether or not they live there). She returns to CATE with a collection of recent films that explore bilocation—the act of being in multiple places at once—a state of being she uses to describe Palestinian identity, as well as cinema itself. The program offers the possibility of bilocating through the visceral experience of drone-glitched TV and teenage cello lessons in Home Movies Gaza (2013); a rhyming exercise in the Panathenaic Stadium in Girls Only (2014); a stroboscopic oral history in Farther Than the Eye Can See (2012); and a hypnosis-inducing pan-geographic shuttle in Deep Sleep (2014), a film/performance. Presented in collaboration with the Video Data Bank.

Dates:
Thursday, April 24, 2014 - 18:00 to Friday, April 25, 2014 - 17:55
Venue:
Gene Siskel Film Center - Chicago, Estados Unidos
Conversations at the Edge: Spin/Verso/Contour

By Marcos Ortega on Mon, 01/04/2013 - 14:45
Conversations at the Edge: Spin/Verso/Contour
An Evening with Hannes Schüpbach
Thursday, April 4 2013, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Hannes Schüpbach in person!

The films of renowned Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach are lyrical, often transcendent portraits of people, spaces, and everyday life. A painter, performance artist, and expert on textile art, Schüpbach weaves together light, gesture, and a keen attentiveness to the material world into meticulously structured compositions. His films, notes curator Haden Guest, open onto “a multi-layered world, where superimpositions and reflections suggest the hidden depths of the places and people evoked within them.” For this program, he presents Spin/Verso/Contour (2001-2011), an affecting trilogy about his parents, and L’Atelier (2008), a portrait of an artist’s studio in Paris.

Organized with the support of SWISS FILMS–The Arts Council of Switzerland.

Hannes Schüpbach (b. 1965, Winterthur, Switzerland) is a painter, performance artist, filmmaker and curator of artists’ films. Schüpbach is best known for his 16mm films, which have been shown at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur; the Centre Pompidou; the Biennale de l’image en mouvement, Geneva; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Tate Modern, London; and the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Category:
Events
Conversations at the Edge: Wavelengths, in the blink of an eye

By Marcos Ortega on Mon, 18/03/2013 - 18:33
Conversations at the Edge: Wavelengths, in the blink of an eye
Thursday, March 21 2013, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA
Curator Andréa Picard in person

Named for but also infinitely inspired by Michael Snow’s 1967 masterpiece, Wavelength, the Toronto International Film Festival’s avant-garde program presents films and videos that defy convention, suggest alternate ways of thinking, and sometimes re-emerge from a distant past in order to comment on the present. Curated by Andréa Picard, who has curated Wavelengths since 2006, this program is a Wavelengths compendium featuring a number of works from the 2012 line-up (including Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV and Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s View from the Acropolis which were all cited in the New York Times’ best films of the year wrap-up and screen as Chicago premieres) and highlights from previous editions, including a 35mm restored print from La Cinémathèque française of Henri Storck’s too-rarely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux. Blinking is not encouraged!
Category:
Events
Conversations at the Edge: Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios II

By Marcos Ortega on Mon, 31/10/2011 - 16:12
Conversations at the Edge: Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios II
Thursday, November 3, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA

Remembered as the “supreme erotic poet” of the American avant-garde, Gregory Markopoulos spent decades creating his monumental film Eniaios, an eighty-hour composition of twenty-two cycles. Eniaios (meaning “unity” or “uniqueness”) was originally conceived for screening at Temenos, Markopolous’s open-air theater in the hills overlooking Lyssaraia, Greece. Silent yet sensuous, the film journeys through a host of imagery, including pulses of white light, passages of black, fragments of earlier works, and images of sacred places. Markopoulos died before Eniaios could be printed and his partner, filmmaker Robert Beavers, has spent the last two decades restoring the work. Only six of the twenty-two film orders have been printed thus far. Tonight’s screening of Eniaios II — the second cycle in the piece and an epic film in its own right — affords a rare opportunity to view Markopoulos’s magnum opus in the making. Gregory Markopoulos, 1949-1991, Greece/USA, 16mm, 125 min plus discussion.

Eniaios VI – VIII will premiere June 29 – July 1, 2012 at the Temenos in Lyssarea (Arcadia) Greece. For more info, visit: www.the-temenos.org.
Category:
Events
Conversations at the Edge: blue mantle

By Marcos Ortega on Tue, 18/10/2011 - 15:35
Conversations at the Edge: blue mantle by Rebecca Meyers
Thursday, October 20, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA

Rebecca Meyers in person!

In her nimble, intimately-observed films, Cambridge-based filmmaker Rebecca Meyers illuminates the uncanny and exquisite in the everyday. lions and tigers and bears (2006) seeks out urban wildlife–from spiders and pigeons to bronze lions and chrome-plated jaguars; night side (2008) captures a wintry twilight of street lamp halos and solitary animals. Shot along the Massachusetts coast, Meyers’ latest film is a haunting ode to the sea. Combining historical accounts of ocean travel and disaster with images of its vast, roiling expanse, blue mantle (2010) meditates on humanity’s attempts to conquer the deep and reflects on its role as a metaphor and passageway to the unknown. This evening, Meyers presents these and a selection of earlier works, including glow in the dark (2002) and things we want to see (2004). Rebecca Meyers, 2002- 2010, USA, 16mm, ca. 65 min plus discussion.
Category:
Events
Conversations at the Edge: The Wild Triumphs of Martha Colburn

By Marcos Ortega on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 10:17
Conversations at the Edge: The Wild Triumphs of Martha Colburn
Thursday, February 10, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA

Martha Colburn in person!

Martha Colburn’s wickedly witty animations are assemblages of stop-motion puppetry, multi-layered glass painting, and all forms of pop cultural detritus. Drawing inspiration from the histories of the American West and more recent narratives of methamphetamine use and environmental catastrophe, Colburn’s outrageous pastiches offer incendiary commentary on our contemporary condition. Writes Jonas Mekas: “Martha Colburn’s films are naked testimonials of our times, and of her generation.” This evening, she will present a range of works from across her oeuvre—including early favorites like Evil of Dracula (1997) and Cosmetic Emergency (2005)—and the Chicago premiere of two brand-new projects, in addition to an in-depth discussion about her process. 1994-2010, Martha Colburn, Netherlands/USA, multiple formats, ca. 75 mins plus discussion.
Category:
Events
Conversations at the Edge: Erie

By Marcos Ortega on Sun, 07/11/2010 - 14:27
Conversations at the Edge: Erie
Thursday, November 11, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State St.,Chicago, Illinois 60601
Kevin Jerome Everson in person!

Over the past thirteen years, Kevin Jerome Everson has crafted an exquisite—and prodigious—body of work on the working-class culture of African-Americans and people of African descent. Combining documentary and fiction, Everson’s nearly 70 shorts and four features center on everyday tasks and gestures to unearth and illuminate the ordinary grace of daily life. This evening, in conjunction with the Video Data Bank’s release of the 25-title DVD box set, Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, the artist presents his acclaimed feature Erie (2010) along with a handful of new shorts. Unspooling in a series of hand-held, single-take shots filmed in the urban centers around the great lake, Erie captures the conversation of former General Motors workers as the plant is about to close; hospital employees carefully sorting and sterilizing surgical implements; and young performers krumping and rehearsing musical theater side-by-side, the camera moving between them in a kind of mash-up-en-scene and microcosm of the rich and multifaceted operation of the film as a whole. Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. Kevin Jerome Everson, 2010, USA, HDCAM video, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).

KEVIN JEROME EVERSON (1965, Mansfield, OH) has made four feature-length films and nearly seventy shorts. He received an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. His films and artwork have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; Wurttenbergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; the Spaces Gallery, Cleveland; the American Academy of Rome, Italy; the Sundance Film Festival; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Cinematexas; Ann Arbor Film Festival; and Chicago Underground Film Festival, among many others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy Rome Prize, and residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Colony. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Category:
Events
Conversations at the Edge: Rosa Menkman - Glitched

By Marcos Ortega on Sun, 26/09/2010 - 03:46
Conversations at the Edge: Rosa Menkman - Glitched
Thursday, September 30, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State St.,Chicago, Illinois 60601

Rosa Menkman in person!

Every technology possesses its own inherent accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and theorist whose focus is on visual artifacts created by accidents in digital media specifically. She describes these as “the uncanny, brutal structures that come to the surface during a break of the flow within a technology; they are the primal data-screams of the machine.” Working at the experimental junction of glitch, noise, and new media art, Menkman creates glitch work and writes texts about codecs, interpolation, and compression going awry. This evening, Menkman will introduce a selection of videos followed by a real-time performance. Rest assured, the equipment is working, though it may not look like it is. This presentation coincides with GLI.TC/H, an international noise and new media conference taking place from September 29 to October 3 at various locations around Chicago. Visit http://gli.tc/h. Rosa Menkman, 2006–10, Netherlands, multiple formats, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).

Rosa Menkman (1983, Arnhem, Netherlands) is the leading international theory-practitioner of glitch art. She has written extensively on digital artifacts and noise, including the Glitch Studies Manifesto (2010). Her videos and real-time performances have been included in festivals like Blip, Europe and U.S.; Haip, Ljubljana; Cimatics, Brussels; Video Vortex, Amsterdam and Brussels; and Pasofest, Ankara. She has collaborated on art projects together with Alexander Galloway, little-scale, Govcom.org, Goto80 and the Internet art collective, Jodi.org. Menkman received her Master’s degree in 2009 and is currently a PhD student at KHM Cologne, writing on the subject of Artifacts.
Category:
Events
Conversations at the edge: The Blindness Series

By Marcos Ortega on Tue, 09/03/2010 - 03:55
Conversations at the edge: The Blindness Series
Thursday, March 11, 6pm
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State St.,Chicago, Illinois 60601
Tran, T. Kim-Trang in person

Still from ekleipsis (Tran, T. Kim-Trang, 1998), part of the Blindness Series, 1992-2006. Courtesy the artist and the Video Data Bank.

The Blindness Series is Los Angeles-based artist Tran, T. Kim-Trang’s expansive, fourteen-years-in-the-making tour de force on vision and its metaphors. Comprised of eight videos, the series draws upon notions of blindness to explore broader political and cultural themes of identity, sexuality, society, and technology. This evening, to celebrate the Video Data Bank’s release of The Blindness Series in a new DVD box-set, Tran will present five works from the cycle, including a provocative documentary on hysterical blindness and the Cambodian civil war (ekleipsis, 1998); an essay on cosmetic eyelid surgery (operculum, 1993); and a meditation on the phenomenon of word blindness (alexia, 2000). “We are invited to approach these works with all our senses,” writes scholar Laura Marks. “The Blindness Series, crankily, and finally tenderly, gives us our eyes back.” Tran, T. Kim-Trang, 1992-2006, USA, Beta SP video, ca. 82 min (plus discussion).

TRAN, T. KIM-TRANG (b. 1966, Saigon, Vietnam) emigrated to the U.S. in 1975. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been producing experimental videos since the early 1990s. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in solo and group screenings, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Tran is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, having been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Getty Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship. Tran also collaborates with Karl Mihail on a project known as Gene Genies Worldwide© (www.genegenies.com). Their conceptual and public artworks on genetic engineering have exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; Exit Art, New York; the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York and elsewhere in the United States. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Scripps College.
Category:
Events