In this interview, Indian artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b. 1968) discusses his role in the initiation of the Raqs Media Collective, a Delhi-based artist collective, active since the 1990s. At the time of this interview, Raqs had been creating documentaries, art installations, and educational programs for eighteen years. Sengupta likens the driving force of Raqs to that of a game of catch, a process generated by a back-and-forth dialogue mobilized through writing and in-person meetings. As children of the late sixties, Sengupta explains how and why the members of Raqs, (himself, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula) share an interest in investigating mass communication, technologies of visibility, and the significance of memory and travel. It is also for this reason, Sengjupta explains, that the Collective’s work is committed to fostering rigorous research in addition to art-making endeavors.
As a well-known painter and collagist, teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and mentor to the Chicago Imagists, Ray Yoshida (1930-2009) had far reaching influence. In this interview, Yoshida offers a tour of his home, showing us the unique dolls, masks, trinkets and tattoo art from which he drew inspiration. Describing his own stylistic progression from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Yoshida also talks about the collage aesthetic and persistence of visual complication in the Chicago Imagist style, demonstrating its various permutations by showing off his collection of works by former students at SAIC. A lover of curiosities, Yoshida also describes discussions he had with Chicago artist Roger Brown about opening a museum for their vast collections of oddities.
— Kyle Riley
Bee Film is a collaboration between filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane and composer Beth Custer that explores the life of bees in Hilo, Hawaii and their human caretakers who are working to preserve an endangered species.
Guerilla Girls are artist activists who have dedicated themselves to informing the public of the gender and racial inequalities that persists in the art world.
Begun as a consideration of the upgrading from manual to digital film editing techniques, Transitional Objects explores the anxiety and loss inevitable in such a transition while also suggesting the consequences of other life transitions.
Meditation is from Martine Syms’ Kita’s World series. Kita enacts the performances of everyday life in a hyper-digitized world.
A familiar landscape comprised of big box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process.
A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies.
John Smith’s Flag Mountain records a vast flag, the insignia of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, painted onto the side of the Kyrenia mountains overlooking Nicosia, the divided capital of the former island nation.
Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was an important member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and was, for a number of years, head of the Yale University art program.
The magic life of the objects reanimate the ancestrality of the aesthetic of dream.
Forming a loose trilogy with Rankus’s two previous works (Naked Doom and She Heard Voices), Nerve Language furthers his visual investigation into the ambiguous mingling of inner and outer worlds.
A volume of illustrated horrors arrives to stimulate the chatter of those who behold its weighty extravagance.
In this interview with Carl Bogner, Sky Hopinka (b.
five more minutes is an exploration of grief. Two women spend an afternoon recreating lost time. What begins as play-acting breaks open into a world where the tenderness and sorrow of having to say goodbye exist untempered.
The Videofreex tape a group of young people working on a farm run by Chris Locke and his wife in Shandaken, NY. After learning how to take care of the chickens, they are taught how to kill and pluck one. Later they sit down for a communal di
Resisting the regime of the counter-shot, this experimental short fiction film follows the story of Alex on the eve of Le Pen’s defeat in the 2002 French presidential election.
This is an edited excerpt of Eiko and Iris McCloughan's experiment working over Zoom on May 5, 2020 as a part of Eiko's Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University.
Burns and Discenza continue to battle invisible forces with the use of various children’s toys, cars and a mechanical digger, a paddling pool, rubber rings and ladders. Eventually they escape the scene of their distress in a hatchback car.
I could not remember anything about my childhood before the age of twelve. I made a decision to remember.
Nancy Graves (1939-1995) was a New York sculptor, painter, and filmmaker who used natural history as a reference for dealing with the relationships between time, space, and form.
Through poetic juxtaposition of the virtual landscape of the phone, the calm landscape of the cabin, and the chaotic landscape of memory, 1991 paints a cruel image of the horror of war and separation.
Part of a trilogy of works known as the Video Wallpaper Series in which George tests out his new audio/video digital mixer and creates a range of impressions of people and places.
Transit journeys through the East End of London, quietly observing the shifting architectural and social landscape.
Originally part of a larger sculptural installation using prospector's tools, this tape reenacts the search for "Olga," a miner's wife who disappeared on her honeymoon in 1936. As Paul and Marlene Kos call out, "Olga...
Welcome to David Wojnarowicz Week is the follow up to A Boy Needs a Friend. Reinke proposes a new holiday with the motto MORE RAGE LESS DISGUST: David Wojnarowicz Week and takes us through his seven days of celebration.
Pat Ward Williams’s socially charged works confront issues of race, often dealing specifically with African American history and identity.
George Kuchar experimented with in-camera editing effects more and more in his later career, and Snapshots is no exception.
The city of San Francisco is awash with talent and some fine eating places too. In this seaport escapade the viewer is detoured by the smell of lamb chops and the sound of loose tongues vibrating with vitality.
Meet local San Francisco artists and the pets of the culturally inclined, as George prepares to take a trip.
The orchestra begins and a male and female dancer move from opposite sides of the stage. The dancers embrace and begin the White Swan pas de deux from the ballet Swan Lake. However this is not the ballet as it is normally performed.
Yvonne Jacquette (b.1934)is an American painter and printmaker known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointillistic techniq
It is a tribute of hyperkinetic colors to the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro in times of pandemic vortex and post-Cubist quarantine. This is Altazor's color drop. Part of the Harmonic and Hyperkinetic Color Film Series.
Interrupting the nightly news in an act of guerrilla television, Gómez-Peña returns to the persona of a Chicano-Aztec veejay—"The Mexican who talks back, the illegal Mexican performance artist with state of the art technology"—to elaborate the complicat
Skim Milk & Soft Wax explores Jewish identity from the point of view of the American filmmaker, who was raised to believe that Israel is the "land of milk and honey".
In Greetings from Lanesville, the Videofreex tour the countryside of Lanesville, New York interviewing the local people for a weekly broadcast program all from behind the wheel of the Lanesville TV Media Bus.
The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.
Over 6,000 gold prospectors invade the reserve of the Nambiquara of Sararé, and loggers raid the mahogany-rich forests, which are threatened by extinction.
Satoshi Uchiumi, Japanese abstract painter, believes that the beauty of painting lies within paint itself. He has pursued beauty by painting thousands of colored dots.
A call for a political transformation, a life that emerges from the earth's own interior.
In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries.
A fragmented puzzle of a sinister narrative turned inside out and comprised of digital video, digital video animation, and Super-8, with model animation and human pixelation.
Voice: off is the autobiography of a forgotten man. Brain damaged, body violated, emotions crushed, Gerry who rarely spoke has now lost the power of speech.
The second part of the Damnation of Faust Trilogy centers on the development of Marguerite, the female character in the Faust legend. Masterfully composing fragmentary "memory" images in elegant 19th Century Japanese compositions, Birnbaum traces the process of deception and abandonment through the heroine’s mournful description of her state of mind. Passing images are suffused with light, obscured in a blinding brightness, to suggest forgetting.
A woman stands on top of a hill in Namibe desert in Angola, looking into an extensive horizon of a vast desert, she signals the hope of crossing these borders symbolizing the repossession of the land and the regaining of a lost identity.
The result of over five years of Super-8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative into a complex meditation on city life.
In this interview, political and social theorist, Terry Eagleton (b.