Afrogalactica was a film-performance by Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. Featuring live reading and video projection, the performance cast Kiwanga as a fictional anthropologist who synthesized fragments of poetry, mythology, pop culture, science, and scholarly discourse to challenge historical narratives regarding colonial struggle and the African diaspora. Reframing the tradition of Afrofuturism as a means to examine African subjectivity and undermine hegemonic discourse, Afrogalactica mixed fact and fiction to generate new stories out of the personal, the canonical, and the supernatural while speculating on possible futures. 

Kapwani Kiwanga was born in Hamilton, Canada and lives in Paris. She studied Anthropology and Comparative Religions at McGill University. Kiwanga was the 2016 Commissioned Artist at the Armory Show, New York and recently presented her work in solo exhibitions at Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago; The Power Plant, Toronto; La Ferme de Buisson, Noisiel; South London Gallery, London; and the Jeu de Paume, Paris.

Fall 2018

Wu Tsang and boychild are in residence with their collaborators Josh Johnson, Patrick Belaga, Jeff Simmons, and Asma Maroof to continue work on a new performance for EMPAC's Theater to be premiered at the 10 YEARS celebration. Footage shot by cinematographer Antonio Cisneros during the August residency will be incorporated into the final performance.

Spring 2018

Wu Tsang and boychild are in residence in EMPAC’s Theater to experiment with light, scrims, and projection surfaces for the development of a new work in their Moved by the Motion series. The performance is conceived in collaboration with Fred Moten, Patrick Belaga, and Klein.

Spring 2016

Artist Wu Tsang was be in residence in the theater with her collaborators boychild and Patrick Belaga to work on the staging of a new iteration of their performance Moved by the Motion.

Boudry / Lorenz present their film Telepathic Improvisation produced at EMPAC in Spring 2017.

Boudry / Lorenz’s film, Telepathic Improvisation, takes as its starting point the late Rensselaer Professor Pauline Oliveros’ 1974 score of the same name. However, the audience for this filmed performance is not only called upon to telepathically communicate with the performers (as is the case with Oliveros’ original score), but also to communicate with the other elements on stage, from the theatrical lights to a group of autonomous white boxes that glide across the stage.

The film is bookended by two monologues: the Oliveros score, and a 1969 text by German revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof that prescribes resistance in the face of global capitalist oppression. Telepathic Improvisation attempts to disrupt historical narratives surrounding agency and action by elevating the technical, non-human actors to the equal status of their human counterparts.

The moving-image works presented in the film series Other Uses utilize a variety of in-camera and post-production techniques to re-frame objects, places, histories, and people that might otherwise remain off-screen.

The series title is borrowed from the English translation of Otros usos, a 16mm film shot in a former US Naval Station in Ceiba, Puerto Rico by artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Filmed through mirrored sculptures, or “malascopios” as the artist describes them, Otros usos projects shifting, unstable viewpoints as multiple prismatic images are arrayed in a single frame. Together, these refracted shards of ghostly architecture, land, sea, and the fishermen who work on it, produce a composite time-scale that gestures not only to the region’s colonial past, but also to the continued militarized present.

This misuse or destabilization of perspective, geometry, and structure within the film frame is a common characteristic of the artworks in this series. Although vivid in surface and rigorous in technique, the films and videos deliberately resist the spectacle of the singularly imaged “event” in order to transform everyday surfaces into the cinematic.

Fall 2017 featuring films by: Doa Aly, Marwa Arsanios, Yto Barrada, Mohammad Fauzi, Morgan Fisher, Joan Jonas, Deimantas Narkevičius, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Shelly Silver, Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms, Ana Vaz, Joyce Wieland.

Spring 2018 featuring films by: Ulysses Jenkins, Jorge Jácome, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Martine Syms’ installation An Evening with Queen White invites visitors to meet the virtual character Queen White. An Evening with Queen White was produced at EMPAC with a 360° camera rig—originally manufactured to capture footage for virtual reality environments—placed at the center of a monochromatic purple set. Guitar amps, microphones, a piano, and acoustic panels that refer to the Motown recording studios of the 1960s decorate the set. Filmed in a single long-take, the performer Fay Victor (as Queen White) moved freely around the set and was continually captured by the camera.

Eschewing conventional VR, Syms explores how the audience can experience this kind of image environment without the use of a headset. The installation plays with the possibility that parts of the performance still remain out of frame or off-screen. Several screens are placed in different locations around the studio and each only shows a small part of the 360° video, exposing the limits of each screen’s size and shape. A mobile screen will allow the audience to explore the missing parts of the image for themselves.

An Evening with Queen White is exemplary of Syms’ use of the monologue as a medium for exploring how voice, gesture, and persona are learned and performed. The script complicates the artist’s own biography and points toward how strategies of performing oneself as a Black woman in America are transmitted and crystallized across generations through both familial teaching and societal conditioning. EMPAC screened Syms’ new feature film, Incense, Sweaters, and Ice, on the last day of the installation (Sept. 6) as part of the film series Other Uses.

FILM/VIDEO

Framed by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Otros usos, the work from which the Other Uses film series takes its name, this screening presents moving-image works by the artist that pay characteristic attention to the geometry, composition, and cinematic potential of everyday, neglected landscapes. By training the lens on abandoned architectures, these films find counter histories and other uses for the troubled landscapes of military and political upheaval.

PROGRAM

• Other Uses (2014) Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
• Post-Military Cinema (2014) Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

FILM/VIDEO

The third program in the Other Uses series turns the lens on unseen processes, people, and objects. The motion we see in the works—whether produced through montage, camera movement, or distortion of the recorded image—directly connects the action on screen to the hand of the artist.

PROGRAM

• Solidarity (1973) Joyce Wieland
• Beau Geste (2010) Yto Barrada
• Ha Terra! (2016) Ana Vaz
• April 2nd (1994) Shelly Silver
• Vertical Roll (1972) Joan Jonas
• Hysterical Choir of the Frightened (2014) Doa Aly

The films and videos presented in the second program of the Other Uses series complicate the relationship between still and moving images. They foreground how images are produced in order to reveal obscured narratives and the way that photographic representations are captured and circulated.

PROGRAM

• Production Stills (1970) Morgan Fisher
• Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (2013–14) Marwa Arsanios
• November (2004) Hito Steyerl
• 20 July 2015 (2016) Deimantas Narkevičius
• The Rain After (2014) Mohammad Fauzi