Forthcoming
The Surface Will Hold
Peephole Cinema, San Francisco
The Surface Will Hold is inspired by The Cloud and the faux ecological metaphors of data storage. The Cloud evokes something hovering above—immaterial and independent of the earth and its ecologies—while, in actuality, is housed in massive server farms and consumes immense amounts of energy, land, and resources. Nature metaphors (sky, air, clouds) abstract land use and resource extraction, and thus obfuscate the scarring of landscape by these physical processes. The Surface Will Hold explores the interplay between sky and ground, digital and celluloid, immaterial and material, making and archiving—where data, images, and their ideologies are stored.
January - April 2024
The Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery
Pratt University
Department of Film/Video Faculty Group Show, "An Egg Inside a Dream Inside a Landscape"
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Curated by Emily Rose Apter and Inney Prakash
Forthcoming
The Surface Will Hold
Peephole Cinema, San Francisco
The Surface Will Hold is inspired by The Cloud and the faux ecological metaphors of data storage. The Cloud evokes something hovering above—immaterial and independent of the earth and its ecologies—while, in actuality, is housed in massive server farms and consumes immense amounts of energy, land, and resources. Nature metaphors (sky, air, clouds) abstract land use and resource extraction, and thus obfuscate the scarring of landscape by these physical processes. The Surface Will Hold explores the interplay between sky and ground, digital and celluloid, immaterial and material, making and archiving—where data, images, and their ideologies are stored.
Forthcoming
The Surface Will Hold
Peephole Cinema, San Francisco
The Surface Will Hold is inspired by The Cloud and the faux ecological metaphors of data storage. The Cloud evokes something hovering above—immaterial and independent of the earth and its ecologies—while, in actuality, is housed in massive server farms and consumes immense amounts of energy, land, and resources. Nature metaphors (sky, air, clouds) abstract land use and resource extraction, and thus obfuscate the scarring of landscape by these physical processes. The Surface Will Hold explores the interplay between sky and ground, digital and celluloid, immaterial and material, making and archiving—where data, images, and their ideologies are stored.
January 2023
Maysles Documentary Center Collection
Criterion Channel
MDC’s commitment to showcasing experimental and politically engaged documentary filmmaking is on display in the selection of films they have curated, which include Cinda Firestone’s revolutionary exposé of the prison-industrial complex Attica, Leo Hurwitz’s galvanizing antifascist landmark Strange Victory, and Kirsten Johnson’s profoundly moving and personal essay-travelogue Cameraperson.
August 30 – September 20, 2021
Abolition Now! 50 Years of the Attica Prison Uprising
Maysles Documentary Center & Third World Newsreel
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Abolition Now! chronicles, commemorates, and politicizes the events of the 1971 uprising and massacre—tracing George Jackson’s influence—through the nonfiction visual documents that came out of it.
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The series reflects on ongoing resistance efforts against prison slavery and police terror. It memorializes the political prisoners killed by guards and troopers in 1971, and grieves the many others killed in the struggle for liberation in the present day. It aims to activate film in the fight for a world beyond policing and imprisonment, and to support organizers on the inside and out in the fight to dismantle the conditions that produce these structures of violence in the first place.
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December 15, 2022
XO & Struggle: An Evening of Abolitionist Cinema
Maysles Documentary Center
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The call for abolition is not one of destruction, but of creativity, comradeship, and collective making. The struggle against police and prisons is the struggle for a better, more just world; in transforming the conditions that produce carceral violence we infuse our work with the joys of political possibility and, in turn, create new opportunities for care and abundance. Drawing inspiration from the George Jackson Brigade’s communique sign-off, “love and struggle,” XO & Struggle is not a memorial but a call to action, an invocation of a political project at times daunting and mournful, and yet always pulsing with renewed life.
June 2022
Home To Harlem
Maysles Documentary Center & CCNY
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Home to Harlem presents Harlem through an archival lens, as both an actual home for Black families and as a location in the popular imagination. By exploring intersections of documentary, amateur films, home movies, musical shorts, nontheatrical materials, and family archives, the series highlights amateur preservation of cultural artifacts and film exhibition in Harlem, as innovated by Jessie Maple and LeRoy Patton’s 20 West: Home of Black Cinema.
February 11, 2022
Rotten Love Redux
Spectacle Theater & Prismatic Ground, Brooklyn
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Rotten Love Redux tips its hat to the days of theatrical porn-going with a celebration of tactility, eroticism and utter decay. The program features 16mm porn and erotic films, each which incorporates decomposed or manipulated film stock in its depiction of erotic femme bodies. Working with both found and original footage, the filmmakers in this program employ a wide range of analog techniques—soaking, solarization, painting, scratching, burning—to alter celluloid’s chemical make-up and add a material element to the onlooker’s gaze. Treating film stock as continuous with the human body, Rotten Love Redux revels in the entangled acts of sex, fetish, and image-making.
July 1–22, 2021
Cinemas, In Memoriam
Maysles Documentary Center (virtual)
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Longing for a return to movie theaters, we indulged ourselves in films that captured their allure. We also thought about the ways they’re inextricable from their social conditions—displacement of communities, historical migration trends, exploitation of labor, and fetishization of space among others.
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These are films that increased our awareness of the ways cinemas have at times represented the side of oppression. They also pressed our belief in the possibility of cinemas as an actively resistant force. As ever, we ask ourselves: is there a way in which the resilience of cinema might be bound up with the liberation of humanity?
November 13–26, 2020
Instant Ancestry: Home and History Through the Black Archive
Maysles Documentary Center & Luminal Theater (virtual)
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“The archive” has never been a neutral body of material. Documents, images, and ephemera—often viewed as objective witnesses of history—themselves reflect the power dynamics and material conditions under which they were made and collected. Tension between what’s been captured and, more tellingly, what’s been excluded, renders the archive a site of both presence and absence.
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Drawing on a wide range of archival material, the filmmakers in this program attempt to cohere questions of Black identity that have been obscured, suppressed, or erased by white supremacy and other dominative forces.
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Like the narrator of The Otolith Group’s In the Year of the Quiet Sun, we use the phrase “instant ancestry” not to suggest an instantaneous recovery of lost/retrievable histories, but to illuminate gaps in the archive, the violent conditions that produced those gaps and the ongoing effort of filling them.
July 16 – August 15, 2020
After Civilization
Maysles Documentary Center (virtual)
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After Civilization troubles the notion of western "civilization" for its deep roots in settler-colonialism and continued imperial project. While some filmmakers in the series recast observational footage to imagine the future, others invoke surreal imagery to visualize the fragility of their distinct geographic settings. Part ethnographic, part science fiction, After Civilization reckons with ecological crisis and the ongoing material violences of dispossession, while gesturing toward a future of collective liberation.
February 2019–February 2020
The American Experiment
Maysles Documentary Center, NYC
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The American Experiment looks inward and outward, toward something porous: what constitutes Americanness, who is represented within American power structures, and what is the the place of the American project of democracy in a globalizing world? With a multitude of identities at the forefront, these filmmakers ask, is America by and for white people, or has it always been an intersection of diverse origins? Or both?
Co-curated with Edo Choi, Jessica Green, and Annie Horner
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Chapter 1: The Truth Is Out There | Chapter 2: Personal Ethnographies | Chapter 3: The Big Crossover @URL | Chapter 4: The Futurism Is OursThe Final Showcase
January 25–27 2019
New Year New Work Film Festival
Film-Makers' Cooperative, NYC
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The Film-Makers' Cooperative's annual celebration of moving image additions to the Coop's growing collection of experimental and avant-garde films. The festival will conclude with a special screening of Stan VanDerBeek's newly restored computer animation series: POEMFIELD.
This year's festival is dedicated to the life and legacy of FMC's dear founder, Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), whose images, sounds and words, diaries, notes and sketches will live on in our communities and in the history of avant-garde film.
Co-curated with Ladya Cheryl and Devon Narine-Singh
February – June, 2020
Made In Harlem: Remembering the Renaissance
Maysles Documentary Center & City College, NYC
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In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance, Made In Harlem uses the wide-ranging lens of documentary film to capture and commemorate, explore and expand the many layers of experience that made up—and continue to make up-—he Harlem Renaissance. The series brings together a variety of film sources to examine visual representations of the Renaissance (mostly nonfictional) and the lasting influence of these representations on political and artistic output, collective memory, present-day Black experiences, and the Harlem of today.
February 13, 2019
Rotten Love
Film-Makers' Cooperative, NYC
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Rotten Love is a program of love stories and erotic films that repurpose decomposing or damaged celluloid film stock. Featuring short works by Bill Morrison, Peggy Ahwesh, MM Serra, and Josh Lewis, this program explores the tensions and inevitabilities of analog film, celluloid bodies, and eroticism in a digital media landscape.
August 30, 2018
The Animated Picture Show: Women of the Moving World
Film-Makers' Cooperative, NYC
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Women of the Moving World features eight 16mm films by women artists who employ a wide array of techniques to explore the vastness of the animated world and bring to life the subtleties of the inner self.
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Co-curated with Kaila Chambers and Noa Ryan
November 22–24 2019
The Vibe of the Village Festival
Museum of the City of NY, NYC
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Film programming collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York's Vibe of the Village Festival, inspired by The Voice of the Village: Fred W. McDarrah Photographs (on view through December 1, 2019).
Co-curated with Annie Horner
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Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
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