Other Uses
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.
Main Image: Martine Syms Incense Sweaters and Ice (2017). Video still courtesy the artist.
Season
EMPAC 2016–17 presentations, residencies, and commissions are supported by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts.
