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.

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