P. Staff’s residency in Studio 1—Goodman asks how we record the excesses of a body. Working with a thermal camera, Lidar, and audio recording designed to capture the body’s sonic impact on a space’s acoustics, Staff generates video documentation organized on principles of scanning.

P. Staff shares their current work in Flesh/Flash: Scanning as Moving Image, a screening and open conversation at the culmination of their EMPAC residency. The artist’s recent research is exploring the act of scanning—as an image practice, as a mechanism of power and surveillance, and as a monitoring of bodily states.

Scanning’s capacity to produce moving images without standard film techniques is tied to its ability to orchestrate the body politic—probing the insides of things, organic as well as social. But what sort of data does this generate, really?

What is the spatial awareness that emerges from externalizing insides of various kinds, and how do imaging tools suggestive of clinical assessments generate something playful, or sinister? P. Staff explores how scanning opens us up, reflecting on the nature of carceral, disciplinary systems at work in them—but also on their potential for productive disorientation, as they pull us away from the body’s surface and open towards a queer, non-normative subjectivity.

This program features recent short films by the artist and provides a window into their current work. At EMPAC, Staff is deploying thermal cameras, Lidar, and audio techniques that register figures through non-imagistic footprints.

In conversation with project curator Katherine C. M. Adams, Staff considers how the scan forges a different sort of political aesthetics than the traditional passage of light through a filmic aperture. Their conversation is framed by a brief presentation of films and an attempt at a discursive performance of scanning the scan—exploring the stakes of taking a sensory X-ray of a locale’s subjects, and offering annotations of the techniques in Staff’s past and present work.

Featured Works

• La Nuit Américaine (2023)
• HEVN (2021)
• On Venus (2019)
• Weed Killer (2017)

This event is currently at capacity. Please arrive at the EMPAC box office on Level 7 30 minutes before the scheduled start time to be put on a waiting list for possible standby entry. Thank you. —The EMPAC Team

Korakrit Arunanondchai explores what the artist calls the ghost layer of images in this work-in-progress. Arunanondchai turns the Studio 1—Goodman venue into an atmospheric environment in which viewers are absorbed by cinematic gestures and proto-human forms. Footage moves in and out of visual clarity as images coalesce on clouds of fog and disperse into air. The program is in collaboration with Alex Gvojic, Aaron David Ross, and Michael Beharie.

The screening scenario also includes performance collaborators that emerge from and disappear into patches of darkness. Towards and away from legible figures, the audience experiences the dissolution of traditional film into pure atmosphere.

Arunanondchai’s artistic practice plumbs the depth of ritual, from everyday practices of cinema-going, to traditional spirituality in Southeast Asia, to the obsessive process of art-making itself. Past performances have taken elemental materials—heat, water—to dramatize the possession of spaces by their historical and sensorial ghosts.

For this work, possession is central—the overtaking of the artist by the work, the viewer by the image, the body by its environment. Arunanondchai’s project at EMPAC also draws on generative artificial intelligence to image chimeric, in-between forms that imagine speculative genealogies and formal affinities between different sorts of subjects, then re-projected as moving images. As he explores parallel, overlapping rhythms of East and West histories, Arnunanondchai’s work offers a vision of history as a sort of collective cinema that carries its own ghosts as it conjures new presents.

In this program, Critical Intimacies: Feminist Imaginative Technologies, artist and filmmaker Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, together with writer and film/performance researcher Katie Kirkland, offer an experimental lecture through dialogue and the exchange of films and texts.

Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland explore the feminine and anti-colonial gaze across performance, video, and cinema. How can we practice critical intimacy within the realm of art, cinema, and theory, i.e. how can we de-construct and construct simultaneously? How can we transform tools of oppression into tools of liberation?

Focusing on feminist forms of resistance and re-enactment, kinship and transmission, Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland center on female artists and theorists with ancestry from East and Southeast Asia whose work grapples with legacies of Western imperialism.

As they discuss specific artistic and theoretical works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and others, they consider the use of hybridity to resist epistemic violence, cultivate self-reflexivity, and build critical intimacy.

Through this program, Nguyen-Chi also explores approaches and themes relevant to her work on the forthcoming film project Letter to the Father (working title), which will be co-produced by EMPAC.

Dramatis Personae is a combined film and talk program that takes inspiration from theatermaker and choreographer Jack Ferver’s practice, giving audiences the chance to engage with ideas and techniques relevant to their work and new commission. The program frames a live reading by the artist of a section of their in-progress work My Town, co-commissioned by EMPAC and NYU Skirball.

Dramatis Personae addresses the performance of self and includes a brief selection of short films and excerpts, including Nowhere Apparent, a short film by Jeremy Jacob starring Ferver, who also created the script and choreography. Other featured filmmakers: Skip Blumberg, Ken Kobland, and David Wojnarowicz with Jesse Hultberg.

Ferver’s work engages with queer performance, the fabrication of personas, and what the artist has called auto-mythology. As a choreographer, Ferver has been influenced by the work of Martha Graham, a pioneer of modern dance, characteristic of sweeping, expressive movements and a vivid relationship to power and vulnerability. Ferver’s choreography works in tandem with their script, which moves through psychological iconography.

Ferver’s theatrical influences have ranged from absurdist theatermakers like the French playwright Jean Genet, to performance in pop culture. Their theatrical work has also often been placed in dialogue with the legacy of camp, a minor genre of performance associated with a self-consciously exaggerated and artificial style.

Ferver knowingly takes up this style in a way that pushes it into new registers of embodiment and self-narration. Considering camp as one of the many ways of playing a role, Dramatis Personae also engages with the ways we are haunted by and re-perform personal and collective archetypes.

Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon return to further develop their video collaboration, Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings (2022), from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić develop a new version of their performance Permanent Trespass while in residence. They draw on projection, sound, and stage possibilities of Studio 1—Goodman to expand the work—originally script-based—into a kind of cinepoem. After premiering the commissioned new performance, the artists remain in residence to edit the film version of the project, which debuts at NW Aalst as part of Bassem Saad’s exhibition Century Bingo.

Sharlene Bamboat is in residence with collaborator Kaija Sirala to develop Bamboat’s one-channel, feature-length Both, Instrument & Sound into a multi-channel installation. Working in Studio 1—Goodman, the pair test out the project across multiple screens and draw on the immersive audio capabilities of the venue to edit the installation’s sound score.

Artist Julia Phillips is in residence to film and test scenes for Pentasomnia, a work intended to become a five-channel video installation. At EMPAC with her collaborators, she develops key movement scenes with a choreographer, uses rear projection to test scenarios for further filming, and undertakes some outdoor shooting.

Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad share their artistic collaboration through a combined short screening program and artist talk. Over the past three years, Grozdanić and Saad have been jointly developing Permanent Trespass, a performance work dealing poetically with collective mourning and the fallout of imperialism and violent conflicts.

This script-based stage piece is now being expanded, in the spirit of a cinepoem, into a performance at EMPAC that incorporates new sound design, archival footage, and material from the in-progress film of the same name.

In their screening program and talk, the artists discuss their collaboration and current interests in connection to filmmaking: memory, mourning, the cultural fallout of conflicts in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia, and performance & dramaturgy.

The presentation will also feature a series of films that converge on thematic or formal grounds with Permanent Trespass in its various versions, selected jointly by the artists for this occasion.