Long before Kim Gordon was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Body/Head, she was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Sonic Youth. In the ’80s, Gordon and her bandmates were fixtures of New York’s downtown art and music scene; one regular haunt of theirs was legendary nightclub Danceteria, which served as the setting for a short film Gordon made sometime around 1985. Now, as Dangerous Minds points out, said video has surfaced online thanks to filmmaker/designer Chris Habib (a.k.a. Visitor Design). “Excellent video I found in my Sonic Youth archive,” Habib writes on the clip’s Vimeo page. “I digitized it for Kim during her [early 2000s] CLUB IN THE SHADOWS exhibition at Kenny Schachter’s old space in the West Village.”
A cinematic and conceptually inventive film that explores the haunting memories of Asia’s late 20th-century modernization through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.
The work of taxonomists hides more secrets than can be perceived.
A woman attends a party where she is observed by and finally meets a mysterious guest.
This work is an attempt to overcome alienation amidst the fragmented construction reality of everyday narrative. Rethinking the meaning of reflections and shadows, framed subjects, body movements, screen, as well as sounds that are constructed by connecting the expression of their existence with the history of representation in modern art.
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
Travel films have an established format with their own conventions, history and baggage. It is a medium that has all too often sought to control, define and dictate perceptions of ”other” places. Comprised of footage shot while travelling on group excursions across Russia in 2019, An Uncountable Number of Threads is an attempt to draw out the ethical restrictions of a travelogue, while questioning how (and why) to make one. At times there is an awkward tourist-gaze, aware of its outsider position. But as a self-reflexive work that considers its own creation, it ultimately unravels, as the artist rationalises themselves out of a particular way of working, inviting the viewer into their uncertainty.
Experimental documentary that poetically exposes the reality of public transport in the city of Curitiba.
Time lapse of clouds and a mimosa tree to the silhouette at dusk.
Be. Belonging. Words on vintage flash cards shuffle past in a stream-of-consciousness that shows the mind working, assigning labels and names to things through love and language. In the space of a moment, perception embarks on an epic journey of tongues, through Cantonese and English sounds and Ektachrome memories that form the characters and identity of this American-born Asian filmmaker.
Date palms imported and cultivated decades ago flourish in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. A cacophony of voices from across generations reflect on the shifting landscape of the region; some remember the first few acres that were planted, while others enjoy the luxuries of new golf courses. Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensorially vibrant 16mm experience that takes us on a journey of past, present, and future. Director Terra Long hand-processed the footage utilizing leftover dates and native plants intertwining the environment into the fabric of the film. Through complex and nuanced scenes, non-sync interviews blossom into a wonderfully gentle but memorable portrait of a community in flux.
Roads fall into the sea and a travelogue breaks against the landscape.
This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.
Across the installation's multiple channels, the camera circles a group of artists as they sit together in a field eating, licking, and squeezing ripe tomatoes. Throughout the ever-changing scene, kisses, whispers, and caresses are shared with a casual, gentle intimacy that reflects interconnectivity and abundance. These queer and desirous exchanges constitute a portrait of collectivity wherein individuals come together as distinct parts of a whole.
This short film follows an intoxicated character's journey through the mystery, beauty and eeriness of his environment.
By the end of the seventies, disco music, considered too mainstream, was dead. But DJs and dance floors still needed new records and faster rhythms. Built on synthesizer sounds, the hi-nrg (high energy) style swept the gay clubs before hitting the charts during the eighties.
"If it Won’t Hold Water, it Surely Won’t Hold a Goat" is an intimate meditation on the subversive nature of goats and their effect on the people who spend time with them. Centered on the story of the legendary Goat Man - a nomadic figure who spent most of his life walking the roads of Georgia with a wagon pulled by a herd of goats - this experimental documentary weaves together an interview with a goat farmer, footage of the daily rituals Johnson enacted with her own herd, and a poem about the Goat Man’s experimental and spectacular life.
Two screens of a graveyard, one during the day and one at night. The duality of everything that exists in the universe.