Sickness and Strength: The Golem as Diva in Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau’s What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?
“How bad must it be to be pain / instead of pain adjacent?” So asks the chorus in Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau’s 19-minute, two-channel video opera What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? This half-interested, half-mocking query sets the stage for a unique and radically affirming exploration of chronic illness. Stones, first shown […]
The Chaos of the Void in Zia Anger’s I Remember Nothing
My first epileptic seizure happened on a Saturday morning when I was nine years old. I remember the sudden, painful oppressiveness of light and sound and a sharp headache that had me looking towards the ground and wanting to bury my head under a pillow or blanket. Feeling lethargic after breakfast, I went back to […]
Who We’re Watching: Vika Kirchenbauer
“Just like in war, the knowledge about the other—or ‘intelligence’ about the other—constructs power; it is the currency that economies of love and war operate on. Nevertheless, the collection of knowledge about the other rarely extends beyond pseudo-factual proof of prior suspicion, most frequently deployed to confirm an identity already inscribed onto the other.” INFRARED […]
Heavy as a Thread: An Interview with Mary Stark
Mary Stark is a hands-on artist whose film installations and performances demonstrate that there’s a place for grace in the heavily mechanized world of movie-making. The Manchester-based artist has spent the past half-decade developing a film practice that juxtaposes the delicate and ephemeral (represented in her work by thread, light, music and speech) against the […]
Women to Watch: Sylvia Schedelbauer
A new regular column, Women To Watch features profiles of women working in all positions and genres of film. Experimental filmmaker Sylvia Schedelbauer’s work stages confrontations between images and their histories. Through associational and oppositional editing strategies, she constructs dynamic images which seem to appear at the borders of vision and the limits of knowledge, filling […]