Ritual

This is a rhythmic invocation of the ancestral fire, in which dazzling flames reanimate bones and natural elements. This is the shining of color.

This is the gaze that is reflected in the dark obsidian mirror.

See a boy turn into a tiger. See the lad vomit colors of the rainbow. Watch him toss marbles onto wet bathroom tiles while holding up a green skull. See him squirm on warm bedsheets, wearing only soiled socks on his feet…… This kid has a mouthful of flowery words to spit out to you !

This title comprises Witchery (2008), The Tiger (2009), Swan Song (2009), Medusa's Gaze (2010) and Opal Essence (2010) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

The idea of suspension is evoked on shifting registers – as levitation, cessation, preservation, and suspense – and located in sites whose identities slip as we track through a space within a space.

Camera, Edit, Sound Design: Deborah Stratman
Scroll: T’ang Yin
Dolly: Matthew Thompson

It is in Pan’s playground where one hears lyrical words that echo in deep realms of imagination where one can dance with inspiration.  But it is not all fun with fulfillment. The playground has vegetation with thorns that inflict the brain with a fever…

"Wedding takes its name from the predominantly Turkish neighborhood in Berlin where most of the footage of the film has been recorded. During the course of six months in 2006-2007, I have recorded the wedding ceremonies of Turkish and Kurdish immigrants in Berlin, which culminated in a large video archive. From this archive I have created a three-channel video piece.. But the experiences I have gathered during the course of this project and the archive later led me to include this subject in my current PhD thesis, on cultural performances, and crowd theory."

... it's not what it used to be.

a personal album and homage, in my own way, to an influential film ... a closet-cleaning scrapbook of beloved photos and oddities ‐ and the gift of fire.

–– Ken Kobland

Dead Body Pose absurdly touches the contemporary bubble, encapsulating both connectivity and spirituality, a connection fueled by the global capitalistic consumption of the self. The more we are in the connectivity loop, the more thirsty we are for spirituality and assign it "a time slot". In the video, the artist performs the yoga rest pose Shavasana (dead body pose) as computer cursors come out of her body cavities and connect to their own spirituality together with her chakra affirmations.

Home Exercises is a short dancefilm and hybrid documentary investigating the gestural habits and choreographies of aging individuals in their homes.

This title is also available as part the Movement Exercises trilogy.

The performance artist Stephen Varble spent the last five years of his life working on an epic, unfinished performance-turned-video titled Journey to the Sun (1978-1983). Only partially complete and under constant revision, this complex work combined Varble’s history of making costumes for performances with his fantastic stories involving metamorphosis and martyrdom. In 1982, Varble decided to make a “prelude” to Journey to the Sun, combining existing footage with new video taken in Riverside Park in New York City.

Tochka depicts a journey made by anonymous group through a rough landscape. After many hardships, they arrive at a shallow ravine where they decide to build a rickety wooden bridge so that they can cross to the other side. Utilizing low-tech handmade machinery and a cumbersome logic, the film questions collective ideology and the process of making art as a community.

‘ODDS AND ENDS’ is a dazzling patchwork of moods, lost and found, for the eye to savor.

The first video of the installation Touch Parade, which as a whole explores “plastic love” or fetish culture and the assimilation of marginalized sexuality on the internet. In questioning what is an explicit and/or illicit image, fetishes found on YouTube that consist of banal gestures, are re-performed. Unlike other pornographic content, these videos evade censoring because they are not culturally recognized as representations of sexuality.

Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence.

At this time even the flowery wars are ready to begin and the flowery atavism begins to flash. The flowers, the skulls, the moon and the sun are ready for the sacrificial trance. Part of Tonalli.

Ken Mate, a 56 year old solipsistic individual, recites Finnegan's Wake while doing sit-ups, talks about talking, and kvetches when a neighbor "steals" the first tomato from his hand-cultivated garden. Drawn from the inside out, this portrait describes who Ken is rather than describing what he does. Commissioned by and presented at the Second Annual Silver Lake Film Festival, 2001.

“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59

Polished obsidian mirrors, tezcatl, were once used in ancient Mexico for divination, to traverse into the worlds of the gods and ancestors.

Through the obsidian mirror, the solar and lunar ritual used to be a celestial dance. In Ritual, suns and moons whirl around, glowing brighter as their paths cross.

To keep a promise made to her dying mother, a young woman goes off in search of her father, a womanizer she has never met. Along the way, she soon learns that he is dead. But that doesn’t change her plans, she still intends to find him. Carried by the spell-binding rhythm of the Maloya, a ritual chant from Réunion Island, Cilaos explores the deep and murky ties that bind the dead and the living.

Riffing on relations between grief, love, bodies, and embodiment, this short film features two former professional Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus clowns. A Dark Love Story for Clowns weaves together a loosely adapted William Faulkner story with a spiritual ritualistic practice in order to explore the performativity around ethics of care and love.

In the nest of the sun, Xolotl, Huitzilin and Xochitl meet to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stirs the new fire of their cosmic dance. Part of the Film Tonalli.

Altares is an audiovisual shrine composed of small temples that contain images of ancient deities.

Tlecáxitl is the sacred furnace where the new fire begins. This is the place where the sun, the moon and fire coincide in their cosmic dance to unleash vital irradiation. Part of Tonalli.

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

The magic life of the objects reanimate the ancestrality of the aesthetic of dream.