The Unreliable Narrator

Los Angeles-based artist Martine Syms is in residence at EMPAC to shoot An Evening with Queen White, part of a new feature-length film project to be shot using a 360-degree camera rig. For this event, Syms will introduce a program of videos by herself and others, alongside a discussion of moving images that have been influential to her work.

An artist, performer, and designer, Syms also founded the imprint Dominica Publishing, which publishes artist books exploring blackness as a topic, reference, marker, and audience in visual culture. Her book Implication and Distinctions: Format, Content and Context in Contemporary Race Film considers performances of blackness in mainstream cinema from 1990 to the present. Other work includes The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, which calls for the culture of the African diaspora to focus its energy on Earth rather than toward transcendence in the cosmos.

PROGRAM

• My Vine Comp (2016) Martine Syms
• Century (2012) Kevin Jerome Everson
• footage from a studio test of NO NO NO (2013) Sondra Perry
• Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) (2015) Rami George
• Monkey (2016) Marco Braunschweiler
• Nine Hour Delay: Printemps-Été-Automne-Hiver 2058 Irena Haiduk
• The Fall of Communism (2014) Hannah Black
• The Borrowers (Ndinda) (2015) Nicole Miller
• The Bucket (2015) Asha Schechter
• Doomed Poet 1-4 (2016) Theo Darst
• Contemporary Artist (1999) Ximena Cuevas
• Double (2001) Kerry Tribe

Watering the Flowers is a new year-long screening program. Each evening focuses on a recent film or video by an EMPAC-affiliated artist, and will be succeeded by a program of other shorts or features that were influential in the making of their work, whether fiction or documentary, experimental or commercial.