Forbidden to Wander chronicles the experiences of a 25-year-old Arab American woman traveling on her own in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the summer of 2002. The film is a reflection on the complexity of Palestinian existence and the torturously disturbing “ordinariness” of living under constant curfew. The film’s title reflects this, as the Arabic words used to describe the imposed curfew “mane’ tajawwul” literally translate as “forbidden to wander”.
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
An investigative documentary on police brutality that uses the Rodney King incident as a springboard to analyze the inner workings of the LAPD under the leadership of former police chief, Daryl Gates. Containing hard-hitting footage of police violence, the tape also depicts communities working against the daily occupation of their neighborhoods. Through interviews with LAPD officers and supervisors, the tape reveals what life is like behind the “thin blue line” and documents a national crisis of violence.
Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved ones.
Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation, soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible, and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.
System failure: A man repeats the story of a prison stabbing as something goes wrong with the tape.
This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3.
The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.
I've Been Afraid is a musical encyclopedia about how women get abused, and why it is they stay. It uses emojis that are as ubiquitous as abuse is in our culture.
Music by Isaac Sherman
In an empty room, a slideshow projection of abandoned places plays alongside the narrative of two girls who find themselves on the shores of a pre-apocalyptic paradise. Told through subtitle text that weaves fact and fiction together, the story of a massacre unfolds. When the image and text malfunctions and the story is no longer comprehensible, the video wanders away from the room of the slideshow, allowing us to see what is happening elsewhere.
In response to BLM events and to the whole world of injustice, slaughter and abuse... a small comment.
–– Ken Kobland
After the ominous attack that the paramilitary and police corporations carried out on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, the student Aldo Gutiérrez Solano remains in a coma until today. A brief homage to the resistance of the body fighting against power.
In Dry Blood (Sagre Seca), various historical moments of political activism in Mexico are superimposed and corroded on the emulsion of expired film. Footage from the International Women's Day in 2017 is coupled with the recording of a powerful speech about the gruesome aftermath of the 2006 civil unrest in San Salvador Atenco.
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
An investigative documentary on police brutality that uses the Rodney King incident as a springboard to analyze the inner workings of the LAPD under the leadership of former police chief, Daryl Gates. Containing hard-hitting footage of police violence, the tape also depicts communities working against the daily occupation of their neighborhoods. Through interviews with LAPD officers and supervisors, the tape reveals what life is like behind the “thin blue line” and documents a national crisis of violence.
“Images from the maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California. A surveillance camera shows a pie-shaped segment of the concrete yard where the prisoners, dressed in shorts and mostly shirtless, are allowed to spend half-an-hour a day. When one convict attacks another, those not involved lay flat on the ground, arms over their heads. They know that when a fight breaks out, the guard calls out a warning and then fires rubber bullets. If the fight continues, the guard shoots real bullets. The pictures are silent, the trail of gun smoke drifts across the picture.
The result of a three-year project with inmates from a high security prison in Romania, Wings for Dogs is an essay about language and its capacity to simultaneously communicate and hide issues connected to guilt and responsibility.
An homage to Luis Bunuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz with a twist to these days control systems of security. From the moment we are suspects we are potential culprits. Therefore we are all guilty.
This title is also available on Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.
The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.
"I, Soldier is the first part of a video series in which I am dealing with the state-controlled ceremonies for the national days of the Turkish Republic. The nationalistic attributes attached to these large-scale ceremonies are underlined in a non-descriptive and almost voyeuristic point of view. I, Soldier was shot at the National Day for Youth and Sports; the day that marks the start of the independence war of the Turkish public under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the Allied Forces back in 1919.
Based on a set of drawings that depict George W. Bush's administration as wounded soldiers in the war against terrorism, RE:THE_OPERATION explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war through the lives of the members as they physically engage each other and the "enemy." Letters, notes, and digital snapshots "produced" by the members on their tour of duty become the basis of video portraits that articulate the neuroses and obsessions compelling them toward an infinite war.
This is an audiovisual manifesto in support of people in resistance against a military coup.
Imagine that the camera is possessed with a psychosis similar to human schizophrenia; suppose that this disease subtly changes every single frame of film while leaving the narrative superficially intact. Then imagine that these symptoms came on as a result of the trauma of recording bizarre or horrific events, for instance those of the 1941 horror film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde...
Adapted from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.
This title is also available on Paul Bush Pixilated.
Tension between a man and his handsome young rival (a Ken doll) erupts into violence. Their interaction devolves from a series of tussles to a spanking.
This title is also available on Joe Gibbons Videoworks: Volume 1.
A sound-essay set in the Tallahatchie County Second District Courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, mythicPotentialities is an exploration of the event said to have galvanized the civil rights movement in America, the murder of Emmett Till, the trial that followed, and the way these event have been mediated through documentary text like Eyes on the Prize, The Murder of Emmet Till, and numerous other books, plays, poems and articles.
Employing footage from an obscure 8mm film trailer for Battle for the Planet of the Apes to highlight the unstable relationship between the real, historical past and the distant, imaginary future, this project revolves around a central question: Is alien-ness indeed the metaphor for the 20th Century as power relationships have been embodied within our subconscious? Is there a relationship between these forgotten formats and the discontinued political ideologies that they depict?
Each year, more women undergo treatment at hospital emergency surgical services as a result of family violence than rapes, muggings, and car wrecks combined. This startling statistic is the basis for a series of site-specific installations on domestic violence, On The Edge Of Time. Underground, the first installation for the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Art Festival, used three wrecked cars strewn along a 180-foot section of railroad track to reference the history of Abolition and the Underground Railroad, and as metaphors for different aspects of abuse.
