Flaherty NYC: The Unwriting of Disaster
with Mimesis Documentary Festival
From August 12 to 18 and in conjunction with Mimesis Documentary Festival,
The Flaherty NYC Presents: The Unwriting of Disaster with Live YoutTube Q&aAs on August 14 & 15
Curated by Devon Narine-Singh, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Alia Ayman
For the first time ever retrospective of films screened across the 66-year history of the Flaherty Seminar, this online program brings together films that work in opposition to the spectacularization of tragedy. To write the disaster, to document the catastrophic, to bear witness to the unbearable event all seem to have become default impulses in times of crisis.
SCREENING NOW:
Program 1:
Boston Fire, (1979), Peter Hutton
Solidarity (1973), Joyce Wieland
I Am 20 (1965), S. N. S. Sastry
Voices, (1985), Joanna Preistley
The Body Beautiful (1990), Ngozi Onwurah
Village, silenced (2012), Deborah Stratman
Program 2:
Losing Ground (2000), Patty Chang
Partially Buried (1996), Renée Green
No Justice, No Peace! Young Black imMEDIAte (1992), Portia Cobb
Now Eat My Script, (2014) Mounira Al Solh
Who Do You Think You Are (1987), Mary Filippo
Live Q&A Sessions available on YouTube:
Friday, August 14
6.00 PM - 6.40 PM (MDT): Flaherty x Boulder (Session A)
Renée Green and Patty Chang
Moderated by Suneil Sanzgiri
LINK to LIVE Q&A
7.00 PM - 7.40 PM (MDT): Flaherty x Boulder (Session B)
Joanna Priestley and Mary Filippo
Moderated by Devon Narine-Singh
LINK to LIVE Q&A
Saturday, August 15
10.00 AM - 10.40 AM (MDT): Flaherty x Boulder (Session C)
Portia Cobb and Ngozi Onwurah
Moderated by Devon Narine-Singh
LINK to LIVE Q&A
11.00 AM - 11.40 AM (MDT): Flaherty x Boulder (Session D)
Deborah Stratman
Moderated by Suneil Sanzgiri
LINK to LIVE Q&A
Q&A #1 - Renée Green and Patty Chang
Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought.Green has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin; Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy; Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, Toronto, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA and many others. Green is currently Professor at MIT’s program in art, culture and technology. Her books include Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010), Ongoing Becomings (2009) among many others. Green has also published essays and fictions in Transition, October, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Spex, Multitudes, Sarai Reader, and Collapse, among other magazines and journals. Her essays, as well as essays about her work, have also appeared in an assortment of international cultural and scholarly books.
Patty Chang is an artist working in performance, video, writing, and installation. Her work has a capacity to explore complex subjects nearly simultaneously, as does life. Born in 1972 in San Leandro, California, Chang received her BA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht, the Netherlands; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fri Art Centre d’Art de Freibourg, Fribourg, Switzerland; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Her work received a 2003 award from the Rockefeller Foundation and a 2012 Creative Capital award. In 2008, she was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize and a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2014, Chang was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. Her acclaimed exhibition “Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake 2009-2017” will travel to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2019. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Q&A #2 - Joanna Preistley and Mary Filippo
Joanna Priestley has directed, animated, and produced 31 films, including the abstract animated feature North of Blue, and the iOS app Clam Bake. Her work maintains a high level of porosity between serious exploration of boundaries and intuitive whimsy, and she is dedicated to experimentation in technique, theme, and content. Priestley has had retrospectives at the British Film Institute (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland), American Cinematheque (Los Angeles), Hiroshima International Animation Festival (Japan), Jeonju International Film Festival (South Korea), Animation Masters Summit (Trivandrum, India) and Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film (Germany). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Film Institute, MacDowell Colony, Fundación Valparaíso and Creative Capital. Priestley was founding president of ASIFA Northwest and she is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where she annually juries the Oscars, Student Academy Awards and the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting.
Mary Filippo’s work over the last three decades focuses primarily on the self and its relation to inequality. In Peace O’ Mind (1983), the characters try to stay safe at home, but become isolated andentrapped there. Images of a domestic space are connected with images of poverty “in the backyard” of this space to suggest the knowing of and hiding from this deprivation has entrapped the characters, physically and mentally, in their private, isolated, and disturbed spaces. In Who Do You Think You Are (1986) the main character, a filmmaker, investigates her own cigarette smoking habit while wishing she could make a film about injustice. She wishes, in other words, to do something heroic. She has been seduced by the image of the cigarette-smoking hero, but an image is only an image. With Feel the Fear (1990, 24 minutes) Filippo links images and ideas about television viewing, self-help therapy, alcohol use, acting, mimicry and social responsibility with metaphoric and formal similarities to imitate connections of cause and effect; but the suggestion of causal logic doesn’t hold up and becomes increasingly skewed. The film’s structure is a metaphor for the contradictions of the culture in which it was made.
Q&A #3 - Portia Cobb & Ngozi Onwurah
Portia Cobb is a video artist and producer of short experimental documentary whose videos and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Although trained as a filmmaker, she began using video because of its accessibility and immediacy in the field. Her work often investigates the politics of place and identity. Through her continuing documentation of urban and rural communities in America and West Africa, she draws upon memory and history "as a means of confronting forced movement and forgetting." Her showings include The Walker Art Center, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum of Modern Art, and the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco. She is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwauke
Black British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah takes on the issues of time and space in her work which embraces heterogeneity and multiple sites of subjectivity. Onwurah consistently navigates and challenges the limits of narrative and ethnographic cinema by insisting that the body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse. An accomplished director with several episodes of the top British TV drama series "Heartbeat" to her credit, Ngozi Onwurah also wrote and directed the prize-winning feature "Welcome II the Terrordome." Sometimes fierce and at others more gently humorous, Onwurah tackles the clashes and ironies of the apparent gulf separating black and white, whilst showing that under the skin, emotions are universal. Onwurah’s films have won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, Germany; Melbourne Film Festival, Australia; Toronto Film Festival, Canada; and at NBPC, USA.
Q&A #4 - Deborah Stratman & Mounira Al Solh (Unfortunately, Mounira won't be attending the Q and A on Saturday due to the ongoing events in Beirut.)
Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land. Most recently, they have questioned elemental historical narratives about faith, freedom, levitation, expansionism, surveillance and sinkholes. Stratman works in multiple mediums, including sculpture, photography, installation, drawing and audio. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Georges Pompidou, Hammer Museum, the Whitney Biennial, Witte de With, Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and has done site-specific projects with venues including the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls (Buffalo), Mercer Union (Toronto) and Ballroom Gallery (Marfa). Stratman’s films have been featured at numerous international festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, the Viennale, Full Frame, Ann Arbor, True/False, CPH:DOX and Oberhausen. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, an Alpert Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and the Wexner Center. Stratman teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Mounira Al Solh studied painting at the Lebanese University, Beirut from 1997 to 2001, and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam from 2003 to 2006. She was also a Research Resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2007 and 2008. She is a visual artist embracing inter alia video and video installations, painting and drawing, embroidery, and performative gestures. Irony and self-reflectivity are central strategies for her work, which explores feminist issues, tracks patterns of micro-history, is socially engaged, and can be political and escapist all at once. She has had solo exhibitions at Mathaf, Qatar (2018); Art Institute Chicago (2018); ALT, Istanbul (2016); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014); Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2013); Art in General, New York (2012); and Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2011). As well as group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020), Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2020), C’arré d’Art Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (2018); documenta 14, Athens & Kassel (2017); 56th Venice Biennial (2015); New Museum, New York (2014); Homeworks, Beirut (2013); House of Art, Munich (2010); and the 11th International Istanbul Biennial (2009). Al Solh lives and works between Lebanon and the Netherlands.
FNYC PROGRAMMERS
Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented screenings and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, UnionDocs, The Film-Makers Coop, Cinema Arts Centre and Maysles Cinema. He has a BFA in Filmmaking from SUNY Purchase. He is currently pursuing his MA in Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017. His film At Home But Not At Home made its World Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in January 2020, with a nomination for the Found Footage Award. His follow up film Letter From Your Far-Off Country will make its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in fall of 2020. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally.
Alia Ayman makes and curates film and video and lives between Cairo and New York. She is the cofounder of Zawya, an art-house cinema located Cairo and a doctoral student at NYU where she is working towards a dissertation on decoloniality, difference and the global circulation of documentary images.