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dozens of piles of hundreds of logs drying in a log yard

Be the Media! Workshop

Theo Jean Cuthand

Theo Cuthand offers a Be The Media! participatory radio workshop workshop at The Sanctuary for Independent Media, to focus on Indigiqueer and ecological issues.

Cuthand’s Sanctuary appearance is sponsored by iEAR Presents, the RPI School of Humanities, and the NEA Our Town creative placemaking project Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail, which connects Indigenous legacy with environmental justice (in partnership with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians).

Main Image: Film still: Extractions, 2019. Directed by Theo Jean Cuthand. Courtesy the artist.

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a lesbian vampire cartoon illustration with a building reading "snack mart"

Video game still: Carmilla the Lonely, 20022. Directed by Theo Jean Cuthand. Courtesy the artist.

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a shirtless tattooed person in a gas mask

Indigiqueer

Theo Jean Cuthand

At EMPAC, Cuthand presents an artist talk and screening that explores his work and process through an Indigiqueer lens. Cuthand makes short experimental videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity, love, and Indigeneity.

An intimate and playful storyteller and performer, the artist often foregrounds autobiographical experience and his home territory of Saskatchewan, where he is a member of Little Pine First Nation, to explore the resonating effects of the ongoing processes of colonization on land and climate, his communities, and the body.

His rangy and irreverent moving image works span experimental documentary and fiction, archival footage and hand-drawn animation, and DIY aesthetics.

Main Image: Theo Jean Cuthand, Less Lethal Fetishes, still, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

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logs on fire

Grounds of Coherence / the language we met in

Shen Xin

Shen Xin and Ali Van are in a remote residency, working on spatializing audio as well as improvisational approaches of engaging audiences for their presentation of a new live program as AX Archive, inspired by Shen Xin’s film Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in.

Main Image: Film still: Grounds of Coherence, 2023. Courtesy the artist. 

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marina vishmidt

On the Recursivity of Care

Marina Vishmidt

In her writing and research, Marina Vishmidt assesses how art, labor, and value intertwine. In this talk at EMPAC, Vishmidt touches on works that use technology and tautology to indicate the unrepresentability of care & maintenance work–be it on the home, the body, or the self. 

Feminist art from the 1970s onwards, such as Margaret Raspé’s Frautomat films from the early 1970s or Fronza Woods’ 1981 Fannie’s Film (both screened as part of this program), exhibit the entropy of maintenance. These works suggest that the foundation of care work lies not only in concern for what is ongoing, but in a recognition of the tendency of maintenance to unravel over time.

Rather than becoming an object of representation, maintenance more often provides the conditions of representation. Its practices of social reproduction pursue a temporality of ever-sameness, a ‘re-’ of production without product. 

In this vein, Vishmidt’s EMPAC-commissioned talk explores a question of recursion, examining how replication of an initial form at different scales, and in different registers of interpretation, is modified by process. Repetitive processes of housework, as in the early films of Raspé, are changed by their documentation and exploded by the mode this documentation takes. Through recursion, repetition yields difference. 

Quote by Margaret Raspé, from an interview with Magazin Florida, published in Magazin FLORIDA #02, 2016.

 

Main Image: Marina Vishmidt speaking at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania, 2016. Courtesy the speaker and rupert.it. Photo: Evgenia Levin. 

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a man in a chinese robe with a hand on his head

Grounds of Coherence / the language we met in

Shen Xin & Ali Van / AX Archive

Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in is a program organized around a new film of the same name by artist Shen Xin. Much of Shen’s recent work explores the ways language weaves together the world. The artist activates translation and live improvisation within their production process to address the discrepancies between what is stated in words and what is conveyed through affect, and to allow multiple voices to access shared histories and spaces of belonging.

This program features Shen and performer Ali Van’s first public project as the collaborative AX Archive.

Shen’s new film–from the ongoing series Grounds of Coherence–probes cultural adjacencies and emergent solidarities by dramatizing linguistic patterns alongside footage from different regions. Myths are recited in English between two lovers; words for stories are named in Arabic; protesters chant in regional Mandarin. Shen follows the spillages from sound and script into images. Overlapping forms of storytelling bring together scenes from a dense forest, a wood cabin, and a public demonstration. The result is a reflection on the power of language to forge commonalities, perhaps even before we become conscious of them.

The event unfolds around a screening of Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in (2023). Together as AX Archive, Ali Van and Shen Xin open the event with a spatialized audio performance that mirrors the narrative style in the film, including recordings from their work as AX Archive.

Following the screening of the title film, the program concludes with a workshop designed and facilitated by curator Katherine C.M. Adams, at the invitation of Shen and Van. It explores how origin myths might create their own sonic, linguistic, and social archipelagos. The workshop is a live session that the audience is welcome to observe or actively to participate in with their own projects. Writing materials will be provided.

Main Image: Film still: Grounds of Coherence, 2023. Courtesy the artist. 

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a person in a full white hazmat suit walking in a lush field

Barobar Jagtana

Suneil Sanzgiri

Suneil Sanzgiri’s vivid trilogy of short films, Barobar Jagtana, connects his father’s childhood experience at the tail-end of Portuguese occupation in Goa, India with the broader history of South Asian anti-colonial struggle. Through a distinct visual language that builds across the series (whose Konkani title is roughly translated as “continuously surviving”), the films articulate a diasporic relationship to the temporal and spatial dimensions of dislocation and memory.

Sanzgiri combines a range of media techniques to link past events to contemporary struggles with an acute sense for the potential of cinematic and digital processes to be slippery records of time and markers of place. The personal histories and collective lineages traced across the three films unspool not only through the memories of the artist’s father, but across the surface of the images themselves in a densely woven set of visual references. From his use of expired 16mm film stock, archival material, and direct animation, to 3D architectural renderings, drone footage, and composited video calls, Sanzgiri’s films defamiliarize cinematic techniques and ubiquitous digital tools alike to trace a media archeology that forges connections between solidarity movements across time. By utilizing media techniques often developed for military and surveillance operations, however, Barobar Jagtana equally explores the paradox that the very tools we use to communicate dissent across continents are also complicit in the long history and continuing presence of colonial violence itself.

Suneil Sanzgiri will be in conversation with curator Vic Brooks following the screening.

Program

  • Letter From Your Far-off Country (2020), 17'
  • At Home But Not At Home (2019), 11'
  • Golden Jubilee (2021), 19'

Main Image: Suneil Sanzgiri, Golden Jubilee, 2021, 16mm and 4k video. Courtesy the artist.

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yusuf hawkins

Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn

Directed by Muta’Ali

In celebration of Black History Month during our Bicentennial year, RPI's Office of Multicultural Programs presents a screening of Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn, a documentary directed by Muta’Ali '01. The event, free and open to the public, will feature a Q&A with the filmmaker and will be followed by a reception in Evelyn's Café. Registration required.

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Muta'Ali. Photo: Jihaad Muhammad.

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An Evening with Muta'Ali

Film screening and discussion with the director of Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn

In collaboration with campus-wide strategic partners, the Rensselaer Office of Multicultural Programs presents a screening of Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn. The documentary is directed by Muta’Ali '01 and takes a closer look at the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in 1989. The film features interviews with Hawkins’ family and friends as they reflect on the events and the loss of a loved one. Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn was released by HBO in 2020.

This event features a Q&A with the filmmaker and is followed by a reception in Evelyn's Café.

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Trailer: Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn.

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Muta'Ali.

Jihaad Muhammad.

ἄσφαλτος — Metabolizing Time

Allie Wist

On view will be a 360-degree panoramic film and a participatory sensorium installation. The piece explores anthropocene geology and the mutual metabolism that occurs between landscapes and bodies. The artist considers toxins and materials that humans input into the earth for digestion across deep time, and how we ask our own bodies to process geologic materials (often for potential detoxification). The work situates asphalt as a kind of speculative future geology and suggests forms of intimacy with industrial detritus. The word asphalt (asphaltos, ἄσφαλτος) comes from the greek sphállō— “to fall, cast down." The installation acts as an open-ended communal feast, where guests are invited to consume edible clay and geologically-inspired foods.

small table outside set with bread, rocks, and asphalt

Image: Courtesy the artist.

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two asian men squat next to a still water body.

In Pursuit: Short Films

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Bi Gan, Gelare Khoshgozaran, and Miko Revereza

In Pursuit features short films that track itineraries through forms of exile or statelessness. Works by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Bi Gan, Gelare Khoshgozaran, and Miko Revereza, center forms of furtive mobility that threaten the loss of political status–chase, evasion, urgent travel, and outlawed movement. 

Following the screening program, featured artist Gelare Khoshgozaran will also present a live multimedia performance about political subjecthood and haunting in the ‘society of the archive.’

Artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s The Incidental Insurgents: The Part About the Bandits (Chapter 2) situates the genre-specific persona of the ‘outlaw’ as a figure that represents shrinking political agency. In Bi Gan’s dreamlike work The Poet and Singer, two men play at the edge of civil society in the Chinese countryside, their taboo actions blended with the characters’ surprisingly lyrical aspirations. Filmmaker Miko Revereza’s essayistic Distancing follows the artist’s choice to leave the United States after living most of his life undocumented. Gelare Khoshgozaran’s Royal Debris explores forms of exile and lost access through a speculative narrative constructed within the abandoned Iranian embassy in the United States.

The films’ inquiries into literal or metaphorical statelessness also affect their constructions (or destructions) of plot. The featured works foreground pursuit as a cinematic device that propels narrative, but also sets up ambiguous power relations between the forces behind the camera and the protagonists in front of it. The films use targeted, in-motion shots to capture a sense of escape and anxious transit. They also make use of poetic gestures, texts, and voiceovers to trouble conventions of genre and to draw attention to the ways in which the camera may appear to have its own motive. Here, mobility exists in terms of tactics and strategies, rather than in terms of the cosmopolitan freedom to travel.

Main Image: Film still: The Poet and Singer, 2012; Directed by Bi Gan. Courtesy Grasshopper Film. 

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an asian person sits eyes cast down in a boat on a still lake with sheer rock sides

Film Still: Gelare Khoshgozaran, Preview of The Mystery of Violence, 2023. Courtesy the artist.