a gift horse’s mouth

a gift horse’s mouth features five short films by various artists that address relationships between the body, mechanical labor, and market forces. Taking its title from the timeworn saying “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” the films offer critical artistic accounts of technological economies that ask how the financialization of technical resources impacts the possibility for agency over our bodies and time.

Daughter of Dog by Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen considers the fragility of the body in the face of violence; questions of weaponry, the presence of a robotic dog, and a pulsing, part-electronic score lend the piece a technological undercurrent.

In We Hold Where Study by Wu Tsang, inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s writing on the dangers of a logistical imagination, dancers perform a four-part choreography amid shifting landscapes: the assembly line / the algorithm / the consultant / the state of war.

Ho Rui An’s 24 Cinematic Points of View in a Factory Gate in China examines how the common cinematic motif of workers leaving the factory has shaped the labor film genre in the US, the USSR, and China.

Filmed entirely in the videogame Battlefield 5, Total Refusal’s How to Disappear attempts desertion from within the game’s militarized logic, seeking ambivalent, anti-war positions inside the software’s rigid structure of play.

Bahar Noorizadeh’s operatic Free to Choose, made with theatrical choreography, animation, and uncanny 3D graphics, catapults us into a future in which time travel is a market force and financial solvency requires loans from one’s future self.

Program

• Daughter of Dog (2024)
• Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen
• We Hold Where Study (2017)
• Wu Tsang
• 24 Cinematic Points of View in a Factory Gate in China (2023)
• Ho Rui An
• How to Disappear (2020)
• Total Refusal
• Free to Choose (2023)
• Bahar Noorizadeh