Visual and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A. J. McClenon translate their 2022 collaboration, Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings, from its previous website form into a multi-channel installation that manipulates the timing and spatial relationships between videos.

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.

Filmmaker Sharlene Bamboat shares her film project Both, Instrument & Sound during this event, which includes a viewing of the feature-length film, a look into a new installation-in-progress, and a moderated discussion.

Originally made as a 40 minute, 1-channel film, the work offers an intimate and sensorially rich perspective on shifting practices of solidarity and alliance-building. Refracted through the life of 80-year-old Tony, an activist in Toronto’s queer community, the work opens up to both political and intimate modes of relation.

In its filmic material, sound score, dialogue and theme, Both, Instrument & Sound dwells in forms of tension, touch, and friction as it explores the potential of collectivity against the backdrop of rising neoliberalism.

Bamboat has described Both, Instrument & Sound’s method as “tension as an aesthetic strategy.” Its sound score combines an array of sonic interpretations of tension, collaboratively developed with musicians and the film participants.

In a moderated discussion after the screening, Bamboat and her collaborator Kaija Sirala speak about developing the multi-screen version of the work while in residence at EMPAC.

Bamboat provides context on her larger practice and discusses the considerations involved in shifting a work made for theatrical viewing into an installation. Bamboat also speaks to the means she uses to consider solidarity and collective struggle in this work and past projects such as If From Every Tongue it Drips (2021) and The Wind Sleeps Standing Up (2016).

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

in a plenum space is a film program featuring two short works by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and a feature-length experimental documentary by Tatiana Mazú González.

A plenum space is an area of a building that supports air circulation, and plenum also denotes a social assembly, particularly a legislative body. This program's featured films reflect on social and material conditions through cinematically navigating visual latency (delays in the emergence of images and their recognition by viewers) and through the use of acousmatic sound (audio that invokes sources remaining withheld from view). Each dramatizes images as they move into circulation, as they become filmic.

The film processes in Nguyen-Chi’s Syncrisis (2018), which the artist considers a “cinematic libretto in six movements,” enact forms of submersion–the camera’s gaze is suspended in water, darkness, or the quiet expanse of a theater. Linger On Your Pale Blue Eyes (2016) imagines the inner life of a scientist as she flees East Germany by using astronavigation to swim west through the Black Sea.

In González’s Shady River (2020), the moving image has been iced over; images must thaw. The film is a slow revelation of a silenced labor history in a small mining town in Argentina. It details the physical, social, and emotional burdens carried by its workers—particularly its few female laborers. Shaped by the filmmaker’s inability to gain entrance to the mines due to her gender, the film’s scenes often hover on-screen like permafrost. González uses subtlety and controlled pacing to coax a story out of landscapes that appear numbed by suppressed emotions and histories. Gradually, voices of female miners and a vivid sound score animate Shady River’s fog-ridden expanses, cracking open its scene of extraction.

Tatiana Mazú González was born in 1989 in Buenos Aires. A feminist activist who once wanted to be a biologist or geographer, her work in documentary, experimental, and visual art explores the links between people and spaces, the microscopic and the immense, the personal and the political, the childish and the dark.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is an artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. In collaboration with characters in search of consciousness, language, and freedom, her recent work explores epistemological, aesthetic, and political possibilities of the moving image.

Program

• Program Syncrisis (2012)
• Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
• Linger On Your Pale Blue Eyes (2016)
• Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
• Shady River (Río Turbio) (2020)
• Tatiana Mazú González

Filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri is in residence in Studio 1 to film scenes that will become part of his feature-length Two Refusals.

Sanzgiri will shoot archival images mapped onto fabric—configured at times like dense landscapes—using various rigging configurations and multiple projectors. The shoot considers ways of imaging historical memory.

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.