THE BODY IS A CAGE, THE BODY IS CAGED
This program in 3 parts is best viewed as a whole — as one long essay with 10 films, broken by two pauses. I curated this program from a personal vantage point, juxtaposing works by different visual artists and filmmakers, including my own work, to explore themes relevant to our current challenges. THE BODY IS A CAGE, THE BODY IS CAGED accompanies bodies that move—and fail to move—through the human grid, from borders to cultural mythologies of gender and class. The body is the “I”-Object, our degraded camera-obscura. Anna Zett investigates how dinosaurs came to play a pivotal role in the mythical imagination of the US, whereas Matthew Lax ironically stages what our zeitgeist dictates to be the new kind of body, the computer-generated one, a byproduct of the global hi-tech industry. Cary Cronenwett laments the death of a soulmate who dreamt of pirates navigating through gender. Jaakko Palasvuo addresses a tourist in Milan, while my characters are immigrants in Berlin with a broken sense of home. Forough Farrokhzad documents people in a leper colony, prevented from transitioning back to society. Heinz Emigholz films Robert Maillart’s beamless arched bridges as Neha Choksi crosses water on a boat of melting ice. – (Lior Shamriz)
Film Program – 1
THIS UNWIELDY OBJECT (2014) Anna Zett 47 minutes
The animated dinosaurs of Hollywood cinema meet the petrified ghosts of colonial science. Dig sites become crime scenes, and fossils turn into characters, determined to play a main part in the mythical history of the US-American West.
BEYOND LOVE AND COMPANIONSHIP (2012) Lior Shamriz 18 minutes
Eleanor, an Israeli experimental musician living in Berlin (“I think that Germany is responsible for 9/11”), discovers what ruins her life.
Film Program – 2
BRUNT DRAMA (2018) Matthew Lax 7 minutes
Androgynous figures struggle to execute various labors within a bleak, vacuous monoculture. Addressing the inherent violence of the real and the simulated, as well as the dubious pleasure of witnessing, narratives of safety, risk and use-value are tested via 3D-rendered, plastic surrogates.
CIRCUIT TRAINING (2015) Anna Zett 13 minutes
Circuit Training dedicates 12 minutes of screen time to a nameless deity of secular culture, alternating between states of rest and attention. In the boxing ring – a square in fact – monologue is promised to turn into dialogue, despite the vulnerable materiality of the human nervous system.
BLADDER (2018) Jaakko Pallasvuo 9 minutes
An essay film exploring transitory embarrassment, travel and independence.
FOR FLO (2013) Cary Cronenwett 11 minutes
A requiem by transgender filmmaker Cary Cronenwett to his late friend and collaborator Flo who died at the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
ICEBOAT (2013) Neha Choksi 13 minutes
Iceboat is a video of a performance in February 2012. The artist dresses in white, as if a renunciate or a devotee, and sets herself to row a boat of ice until the boat melts and releases her into the waters.
Film Program – 3
L’AMOUR SAUVAGE (2015) Lior Shamriz 25 minutes
Lost love, lost artistic collaboration, the two are meeting for one night as she briefly visits the city where he still lives.
THE HOUSE IS BLACK (1963) Forough Farrokhzad 22 minutes
A 1963 short documentary by poetess Forough Farrokhzad, looking at life and suffering in a leper colony.
MAILLART BRIDGES (2001) Heinz Emigholz 24 minutes
In this captivating and informative documentary filmmaker Heinz Emigholz continues his exploration of architecture as autobiography by examining the work of legendary bridge-builder Robert Maillart, who revolutionized concrete based construction.