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

October, 2025

Suneil Sanzgiri is in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to devise the final installation of his new film An Impossible Address, which engages installation, lighting, and archival photography.

February, 2025

Sanzgiri is back in residence in EMPAC’s Audio Production Suite to record a voiceover for his forthcoming film, An Impossible Address (formerly Two Refusals).

June, 2024

Filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri is in residence in Studio 1 to film scenes that will become part of his feature-length An Impossible Address (formerly 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.

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

Using improvisational documentary techniques, the Be The Media! workshop participants will create a short radio play with Theo Jean Cuthand, loosely inspired by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast but based on the colonization of what is now Troy by European Settlers. This workshop will begin with a brief presentation of Cuthand’s work.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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'

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.