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.

This screening and discussion is for Rensselaer community members only at this time. Registration is required.

Please join artist and poet Anaïs Duplan for a screening, discussion, and book-signing. Following a program experimental documentary works selected by Duplan, there will be a collective discussion on the films and videos that inspire his work. 

Blackspace is an ongoing project that encompasses Duplan’s recent book and his EMPAC-commissioned radio series that follows the artist’s lyrical exploration of the political potential of aesthetic experiences, from everyday sensations to the transformative reckoning with an artwork. These experiences are viewed through the prism of how Black and Indigenous artists and artists of color are working with media technologies on their own terms to seek “liberatory possibility” through specifically aesthetic means. 

The screening features films and videos that Duplan is currently researching. Each in its own way subverts the documentary impulse and expresses the tension between a straightforward documentary form of “telling” and an aesthetic approach that experiments with opacity as a strategy of refusal.

The event will finish with a book-signing by the artist of Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020). A limited number of copies are available for our campus community for free on a first come first served basis.

Program

• SPLASH (1991)
• Directed By Thomas Allen Harris
• 7 min, color, sound 
• Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016)
• Directed By Sondra Perry
• 9:05 min, color, sound, HD video
• Nor Was This All By Any Means (1978)
• Directed By Anthony Ramos
• 24 min, color, sound
• Off Limits (1988)
• Directed By Rea Tajiri
• 7:30 min, color, sound
• Water Plastic Bag (1973)
• Directed By Anthony Ramos
• 8:45 min, b&w, sound
• Hand Dryer (2012)
• Directed By Maggie Lee
• 00:27 sec, color, sound
• Re Dis Appearing (1977)
• Directed By Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
• 2:30 min, b&w, sound
• Landscapes and Subtitles (2013)
• Directed By C. Spencer Yeh
• 6:16 min, color, sound, HD video
• ART THOUGHTZ with Hennessy Youngman: Relational Aesthetics (2011)
• Directed By Jayson Scott Musson
• 5:27 min, color, sound, HD video

Please join us for a presentation by American artist Tony Cokes. 

Through a rigorous analysis of images and language, Tony Cokes dissects the often-obscured power dynamics at work in the cultural and political representation of histories of Blackness, class, and the war on terror. 

Cokes’ distinctive artworks and installations center on videos that foreground textual statements, often overlaid onto colorful monochromatic backgrounds with pop, punk, and electronic music soundtracks. Quoting language from across the political spectrum—from philosophical statements to news, art criticism, advertising, and song lyrics—Cokes mixes linguistic, visual, and sonic oppositions in a pared back approach that refuses the easy desire for a spectacular image. Shot through with wry humor and the aesthetics and upbeat music of popular culture, the videos project unstable meanings that deconstruct how we receive and read images.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) and streaming online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Please join us for this online event featuring the artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka in conversation with curator Mariana Fernández. 

Over the past decade, Hopinka’s videos and films have been animated by an exploration of language as a way to formulate questions of identity and belonging. Hopinka’s filmmaking career began around the same time he started learning Chinuk Wawa, an almost extinct creole trade-language spoken in the Pacific Northwest, and Hočąk, the endangered, Indigenous language of the Ho-Chunk peoples. His works often overlay English, Chinuk Wawa, and Hočąk to move beyond static ideas about language and cultural identity. 

As the third in EMPAC’s Decolonizing Language series of conversations seeking to destabilize linguistic hierarchies and present strategies of Indigenous language revitalization, Hopinka will discuss his use of language in crafting alternative understandings of place, community, and knowledge transmission.