staging grounds is an open platform for performance, installation, and public programs.

By staging our shared experiences, how might we open up new forms of collective possibility? A staging ground is the architecture for an event—a place where people, objects, and ideas gather in anticipation of an unfolding scene. What follows may be a construction, a mission, a broadcast, a migration.

At EMPAC, staging grounds explores how art, cultural memory, and experience are shaped by structures that re-animate events across time. How do objects, gestures, or stories gain new meaning when they’re set in motion? How does each performance or installation transform what we inherit from the past, showing how culture survives by being continuously re-staged?

Anchoring staging grounds are two new commissions by artists Korakrit Arunanondchai and Jewyo Rhii, with additional artworks by Na Mira and Samson Young, and a film by Li Yi-Fan. The program also includes open installations, talks, workshops, and screenings in three distinct sites of gathering—the studio, the lobby, and the theater—each inviting you to witness, question, and take part in the unfolding scenes.

Join Executive Director Dena Beard for a one hour tour of the EMPAC building with a reception to follow in Evelyn's café.

How do we build a world from the detritus of a faltering society? How are we responsive to the environment, people, and objects around us? What are the ways that we can hold a more sacred relationship to one another? This in-progress installation from artist Yanira Castro and her design team—including Kathy Couch and RPI alum Stephan Moore—invites you to enter and effect a rumbling, buoyant, weather-like microcosm constructed of shipping pallets, clothing bundles, tarps, and emergency paraphernalia. Explore how your own actions, presence, and storytelling influence the space and atmosphere. Then stay to share your experience of the project at this early stage of development with the artistic team.

Break Out ‘25 is a two-day symposium (of sorts) that celebrates the research, writing and filmmaking initiated by the 2025 UnionDocs UNDO Fellows, hosted at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). Set within the extraordinary architecture of EMPAC, this gathering brings together an exciting mix of filmmakers, writers, critics, and curious minds to think together about the evolving shape of documentary and how it operates in the world today. Come through and spend two days with us as we dive deep into the fellows’ evolving research with screenings, spirited dialogue, and shared inquiry!

This year’s cohort—artists Bo Wang, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Travis Wilkerson, and Courtney Stephens—are joined by leading critics and writers Rachael Rakes, Aruna D’Souza, Victor Guimarães, and Julia Gunnison, whose conversations have helped shape the threads of inquiry that continue to unfold.

Connected through a match-making process, each pair’s research has expanded out from the practice of the documentary artist, to ask a question that seeks to understand how it operates in the world and can impact social movements.

Three public tours with curator Katherine Adams offer insights into how EMPAC’s unique building is used to stage Suneil Sanzgiri’s new commission An Impossible Address.

A reception will be offered on Saturday November 1, beginning at 2:30PM.

EMPAC is pleased to present the American premiere of artist and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri’s new film An Impossible Address. Sanzgiri’s new work traces the fraught legacy of Sita Valles—a revolutionary of Goan origin who fought in the liberation struggle in Angola, where she was later disappeared by the state. Grappling visually, sonically, and narratively with the difficulty of querying Sita’s elusive history from the standpoint of a silent present, Sanzgiri’s film confronts the contradictions of solidarity and afterlives of collective trauma beyond the grave. How do we bear witness to revolution interrupted? An Impossible Address is styled as a letter that cannot be delivered–seizing on sounds and images that erupt from historical memory.

An Impossible Address builds on Sanzgiri’s extensive engagement with Afro-Asianism, the 1955 Bandung Conference, and cross-continental networks of resistance that bridged India and Angola in struggles for freedom from Portuguese rule. The exhibition of the project engages visually with the idea of the political stage. Alongside the central film, it breaks down the architecture of official performance into informal poetics, through selected image prints and textiles that nod to the nine distinct acts of Sanzgiri’s film. Working against archives’ gaps and lapses, An Impossible Address explores the potency of collective inheritance.

Program

• An Impossible Address (2025)
• Suneil Sanzgiri
• Runtime: 40min

Writer and film curator Yasmina Price offers a screening program of short films by various contemporary artists, parallel to the exhibition of artist Suneil Sanzgiri’s new commission An Impossible Address. Price, whose reflections on post-colonial solidarity appear in Sanzgiri’s film, was a close interlocutor of the artist during the work’s production. Drawing on her robust engagement with politically-engaged African cinema, Price will also offer an introduction at the top of the program.

Paired with short films by contemporary artists, a selection from Franco-Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror’s Carnival Trilogy will open this screening of films.

Program

• À Bissau le carnaval (Carnival in Bissau)
• Sarah Maldoror, 1980, 18 min
• Cuba
• Filipa César, 2013, 11 min
• Measures of Distance
• Mona Hatoum, 1988, 16min
• Landslides
• Caroline Déodat, 2020, 12min
• Le roi n’est pas mon cousin (The King is not my Cousin)
• Annabelle Aventurin, 2022, 30 min
• Total run time: 87 minutes

This Be the Media! workshop, invites artists and audiences into the world of artist Suneil Sanzgiri’s new film An Impossible Address alongside the work of Albany arts organization YouthFX. The program opens with a workshop session on film practice. With a focus on the challenges facing emerging filmmakers, Suchak and Sanzgiri reflect on the practical work of filmmaking and consider its impact on the histories and communities it engages.

The program comprises the workshop session, a dinner for workshop participants, and is followed by a screening of works from Sanzgiri’s series Golden Jubilee.

Artist and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri’s EMPAC-commissioned film An Impossible Address is styled as a letter that cannot be delivered. Wrestling with a revolutionary’s disappearance from Angola and from historical records, the film pursues a story that remains just out of reach, seizing on sounds and images that erupt from collective memory.

An Impossible Address is exhibited as an expanded installation in EMPAC's Studio 1—Goodman, where Sanzgiri shot key sections of the film. The exhibition includes the newly commissioned film and stages a series of archival prints and related artistic interventions by the artist. Viewers can engage with the project through tours and a Saturday film screening in the theater featuring additional contemporary artists. Guest-programmed by Sanzgiri’s collaborator Yasmina Price, the Saturday screening explores the larger aesthetic and political context to which Sanzgiri’s work responds.

The series runs from October 29 through November 1 and includes a film practice workshop at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, three open days of the film running in Studio 1, tours with the curator, and a contextualizing afternoon of film to round out the events.

Jewyo Rhii is in residence to develop her forthcoming commission with EMPAC. Designed as a “storytelling machine,” Rhii’s work is a large architecture circulating a series of set pieces, paintings, and ephemeral objects. While in residence, Rhii works with EMPAC’s Stage Technology engineers to prototype the project’s mobile structure.