Myth

In this interview American filmmaker, poet, and lyricist, Cecelia Condit gives shape to the contours of her work process. The artist describes the influence of her relationship with her mother, her long-term investment in the macabre, and her ongoing desire to confront death through art. While covering a broad range of topics, Condit’s discussion of her work and interests returns to several defining themes: aging, grotesqueness, and the notion of movement, both in terms of her own past as a dancer and the notion of the body in decay. With a particular emphasis on the production and context of her videos, Annie Lloyd (2008), and All About a Girl (2004), this interview offers insight into the artist’s fascination with aging, sweetness, and storytelling, while also articulating her joyful sense of discovery within the art-making process. No longer working with scripts, Condit presents herself in the interview as a scavenger–much like the crows she incorporates into her work–assembling videos which straddle the line between strange and silly. – Faye Gleisser

Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan.

With sampled image and sound sequences referring to one another in a precisely calculated rhythmic alternation on four projection surfaces, Călin Dan draws a portrait of the city of Bucharest. Dilapidated tower blocks next to estates of terraced houses, Roma families camping with their horses and carts in the wastelands in the midst of the city, broken streets and new shopping paradises--today the formerly communist Bucharest is a city in upheaval, full of social contradictions and oppositions.

An excerpt from Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry Anslinger’s War on Drugs [University of Chicago Press (2016)] as written and spoken in voice over by Alexandra Chasin. “Charadrius Dubius: A Play of Birds, Plants, and People in the Contact Zone,” inverts Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, taking the perspective of the Lotus Eaters—and then inverts that perspective too. Disciplines from the Northern Hemisphere—Literature, Botany, Anthropology—go swirly in Equatorial climes.