- When
- Sat., Nov. 30, 2024, 2–5 p.m.
- Where
- Art Theater
- Tickets
-
$10 ($8 for students and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh Members)
$64 Season Pass ($48 for students and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh Members)
Register 🎟
This program examines the concept of the archive through a selection of films that utilize archival material as part of their process and question the inherent authority these institutions hold.
Introduced in person by Liz Park, Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art.
Program
- Skywalker/Skyscraper (Dawn)†
(Marie Watt, 2021, reclaimed wool blankets, steel I-beam, cedar) - Wrathful King Kong Core*
(Lu Yang, 2011, 5 min.) - I THINK OF SILENCES WHEN I THINK OF YOU
(Jonelle Twum, 2023, 9 min.) - O dust
(Jesse Chun, 2022–2023, 7:27 min.) - Golden Jubilee
(Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021, 19 min.) - Visions of the Deep Past
(David Blandy, 2020, 4:30 min.) - Grosse Fatigue
(Camille Henrot, 2013, 13 min.)
Run time: 53 min.
* Looped in the Art Theater prior to screening
† Part of Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection, on view in Scaife 16 gallery in the exhibition Crossroads: 1945 to Now
Notes from guest film programmer, Astria Suparak
Language is woefully insufficient. “The limits of language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein). Intonation can reverse the meaning of a phrase, and there are ways to communicate without words. “Loud silences of pain, defiance, endurance, poetics. A silence that sings refusal,” observes Jonelle Twum.
Speech trailing off, indicating words left unsaid; perhaps doubt setting in… Lapses of time, a pause (dot, dot, dot) An indeterminate amount of words omitted or disappeared […]
“What is liberation when so much has already been taken?” asks Suneil Sanzgiri’s father. He tours a virtual rendering of their ancestral home created with the same technology used by mining companies before their toxic extraction in the region.
Other phantoms: culture that can’t be touched, can’t be held, evoked by Jesse Chun’s sojourn through the Intangible Heritage archives, interspersed with a letter to her late grandmother. Camille Henrot mashes up the most common form of myth, usually orally passed down, of how the universe formed. Origin stories followed by cataclysms, with a world after humans visualized by David Blandy in collaboration with teenagers and young adults in North West London. And the world starts anew, again. Elliptical, ellipses.
“We are here because you were there.” Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s aphorism is an evergreen explanation of migration that is a legacy of colonialism.
Sites include: the filmmakers’ ancestral lands in Ghana and Goa, the Intangible Heritage archives of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in Paris, the collection storage of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the roleplaying game The World After.