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.

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.

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.

Please join us for an evening of films and conversation with artist Ayo Akingbade.

Akingbade’s enigmatic and vividly-rendered films deconstruct systems of power with a singularly candid and genre-defying approach. Including a selection of Akingbade’s short films from the last seven years produced in the UK, Nigeria, and the US, this event foregrounds works that are exemplary of her autobiographical style. Shown together, they eloquently weave personal memory with communal history, longing with familiarity, the quotidian with the magical in an intimate program grounded in the specific rhythms of place.

Based in London, Akingbade’s award-winning films are presented world-wide, including at Cannes Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, and the Chisenhale Gallery, London.

Presented by UnionDocs in partnership with EMPAC at Rensselaer, join us for an evening of films by UNDO Fellows Deborah Stratman, TJ Cuthand, Miryam Charles, and Crystal Z. Campbell.

The program begins with a preview of Deborah Stratman’s new film, Last Things, which traces evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. Last Things is followed by two works by TJ Cuthand, including Lost Art of the Future (2022) in which Cuthand talks about artists he has known who have passed while living with HIV/AIDS, and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer. Miryam Charles’s Cette Maison (2022) follows its protagonist Tessa into a future that did not happen, while in Crystal Z Campbell’s A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse (2017-2020) an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.

Break ꩜ut is a symposium (of sorts) that celebrates the research, writing and filmmaking of artists and writers who seek to break out of the patterns and preconceptions that dominate the documentary form. Ashon Crawley and Crystal Z Campbell, Lakshmi Padmanabhan and Miryam Charles, Jas Morgan and TJ Cuthand, and Sukhdev Sandhu and Deborah Stratman lead a series of public dialogues and screenings developed during The UNDO Fellowship over the course of two days.

The UNDO Fellowship is a yearly program that pairs four artist filmmakers with four writers to each propose a research topic inspired by the artist’s practice. Having stewed on these thorny questions in regular dialogue with the whole group of fellows over the year, the participants subsequently invite more voices to weigh in, add context, and bring new challenges to the conversation, resulting in the publication of a new volume of commissioned texts.

Join us for a special screening of Ephraim Asili’s debut feature-film The Inheritance (2020), produced at EMPAC on a film set constructed in Studio 1—Goodman. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artist. 

Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance weaves histories of the West Philadelphia–based MOVE Organization, the Black Arts Movement, and dramatizations of the life of the filmmaker when he was a member of a Black activist collective. Centering on what Asili describes as a “speculative reenactment” of his time in a West Philadelphia collective, the actors scripted lives on set are entwined with cameos by MOVE's Debbie Africa, Mike Africa Sr., and Mike Africa Jr., and poet-activists Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker.

After the EMPAC preview of The Inheritance in Spring 2020 was postponed due to COVID-19 protocols, it premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and went on to screen at festivals and museums around the world including the New York Film Festival and the National Gallery of Art. The film was awarded the Grand Prize at Paris film festival Cinéma du Réel in 2021.

Join us for a special preview of director Daniel Weintraub's new feature-length film, Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, a documentary that traces the life and work of visionary composer, musician, teacher, technological innovator, and Rensselaer distinguished research professor of music Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016).

An electronic music pioneer, Oliveros' approach to composition sought to produce a place, sound, and experience outside the normative conventions of Western music. Dispensing with the primacy of the concert hall, the virtuosic musician, and the hierarchically disciplined relationship of audience and performer, Oliveros instead approached music through Deep Listening, her meditative practice of sound and body experiments structured by concentrated attention to the acoustic environment. 

Produced in collaboration with executive producer IONE, Oliveros' partner in life and work, and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc., the film combines rare archival footage, including recordings from her performances at EMPAC, with intimate interviews that illuminate Oliveros' radical experiments with sound, technology, and philosophy that define her life of listening. 

A Q&A with Daniel Weintraub and IONE will follow the screening. 

In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s EMPAC-commissioned feature-length film Oriana, a band of feminist militants takes refuge in a thriving Puerto Rican landscape. The film relocates Monique Wittig’s infamous novel Les Guérillères to the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria, where its protagonists work and cook, dance and rest, and prepare for battle amidst the abundant tropical vegetation.

Suffused with unexplainable encounters, Oriana unfolds across forests, caves, rivers, and the ruins of industry and colonial infrastructure abandoned and fallen into disrepair. Encompassing both delirious choreographic interludes and attention to quiet rituals, the film maps a world of perceptual distortions, obscure gestures, and collective processes, one where quotidian objects transform into arcane weapons and where ancestral spirits and the recently dead alike become phantasmatically present.

Performed by a cast of Santiago Muñoz’s collaborators who come from music, performance, art, and poetry, Oriana was filmed on location in Puerto Rico and at EMPAC, where the Center’s theater itself becomes a site of temporary shelter and respite from a struggle that remains at once omnipresent and unspecified. Nevertheless, against this backdrop of exhaustion and threat, the film strives to visualize the ecstatic and unsettling potential of new social forms, languages, and ways of living in the aftermath of a slow exit from long legacies of colonization and patriarchy.

The African Desperate follows artist Palace Bryant on one very long day in 2017 that starts with her MFA graduation in New York’s Hudson Valley and ends at the Chicago Blue Line Station. Set against the lush backdrop of late summer, Palace navigates the pitfalls of self-actualization and the fallacies of the art world.

Shot through with Martine Syms' celebrated conceptual grit, humor, social commentary, and vivid visual language, and starring artist Diamond Stingily, The African Desperate leads us on an intimate and riotously funny journey through picturesque landscapes and artists’ studios, from academic critiques to backseat hookups, and from the night of a wild graduation party to the morning of a lonely trip back home.

A conversation with Martine Syms will follow the screening. 

Artist Martine Syms is in residence to complete the audio post-production for a new feature-length moving-image work, The African Desperate. The film follows its main protagonist, Palace, on one very long day in August 2017 that starts at an MFA program in upstate New York and ends at the Chicago Blue Line Station. The principal filming of The African Desperate took place in July 2021 on location throughout the Hudson Valley.

Martine Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. She has shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Tate Liverpool. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award and the Future Fields Art Prize.