[Frameworks] What We Imagine in Its Absence Starts Thursday - Films by Vika Kirchenbauer this week

Tue May 11 17:08:18 UTC 2021

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What We Imagine in Its Absence
Films by Vika Kirchenbauer and Caroline Key
Starting Thursday May 16
Untitled Sequence of Gaps, by Vika Kirchenbauer. 
Los Angeles virtual premiere this Thursday - Sunday

In order to know something, must we be able to see it? If not, then how do we come to know what refuses visibility? What is imagined in what we cannot see?

This three-part program series explores these questions by engaging with the works of two artists and filmmakers Vika Kirchenbauer (Berlin) and Caroline Key (Brooklyn, NY). Within their respective practices, these artists meditate on conditions of alterity and constructions of otherness by exploring opacity as a mode of formal, conceptual, and aesthetic address.

Rather than prioritizing notions of transparency and the insistence of visual representation as a central means of capture, Kirchenbauer and Key instead call attention to the gaps, traces, and peripheries of the subjects within their works. Through utilizing forms of experimental non-fiction, essay, translation, and performance, the artists’ works in this series reflect on the conditions of medicalized, institutional, and state violence and its material and affective impacts on subjects marked by racialized, gendered, classed, and sexual difference. They allow us to consider what remains unknowable, invisible, or unremembered within the limitations of the image and its production, and by doing so, reveal what often lies in plain sight -- reorienting us to other registers of perception, speculation, and impossibility.
Programmed by Leeroy K. Y. Kang

For this series we are presenting two screenings online and a conversation:
Part 1: Vika Kirchenbauer runs from May 13 - May 16, 2021
Part 2: Caroline Key runs from May 20 - May 23, 2021
Part 3: Conversation with both artists and programmer Leeroy K. Y. Kang will be on Thursday May 27 at 5 pm PDT

All tickets include admission to the conversation on May 27.

Welcome Address, by Vika Kirchenbauer.  Los Angeles virtual premiere
PART 1: VIKA KIRCHENBAUER
May 13-16, 2021Tickets: https://watch.eventive.org/whatweimagine/play/608484d57fd9590094872741
Suggested donation: $12 general, $8 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
All tickets include admission to the conversation with the artists premiering on May 27.

This program features five works by Berlin-based filmmaker, artist, writer, and music producer Vika Kirchenbauer, including the Los Angeles virtual premiere of her new short film, UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS, which recently was awarded the German Film Critics Award for Best Experimental Film in 2020. Offering a glimpse into Kirchenbauer’s wide-ranging practice, these works are interconnected through their complex negotiations of visibility as they relate to ideas of personal and collective memory/non- remembrance, politics of spectatorship, and the performative gestures by which difference is codified. These themes are explored as part of the artist’s ongoing examination of the role of the participatory gaze in the maintenance of violence and institutional power structures.Produced nearly a decade apart, LIKE RATS LEAVING A SINKING SHIP (2012) and UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS (2020) operate in many ways as companion pieces -- two essay films that offer reflections on the artist’s past through first-person and polyvocal address, montage, and non-linear narrative. As the former challenges categorical distinctions between personal subjectivity and psychiatric discourse surrounding the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, the latter approaches trauma-related memory loss through reflections on light outside the visible spectrum, meditating on what is felt but never seen. These films work to examine the interiorities of trauma and the unstable devices of visuality, remembrance, and the institutionalized notions of objectivity that cipher into our everyday understandings of personal and collective history.Continued themes of spectatorship and the politics of “looking” figure into the remaining works in the program. Produced as part of her music production project COOL FOR YOU, the two works SHE WHOSE BLOOD IS CLOTTING IN MY UNDERWEAR (2016) and SHAME/HUMILIATION (2018) feature Kirchenbauer’s frequent use of infrared cameras in her practice, TRT: 53 mins*This program is geo-blocked to the United StatesVika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. In her work she explores opacity in relation to representation of the ʻotheredʼ and discusses the role of emotions in contemporary art, labour and politics. With particular focus on affective subject formation, she examines violence as it attaches to different forms of visibility and invisibility, and considers the ways in which subjects are implicated in and situated within institutional power structures.Her work has been presented in a wide range of contexts including Whitechapel Gallery London, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Bonn Museum of Modern Art, ICA Artists’ Film Biennial, Kunsthal Charlottenborg Copenhagen, Donaufestival Krems, transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Berlinale – Berlin International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Images Festival Toronto, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, European Media Art Festival and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. She has given lectures at institutions such as New York University, Goldsmiths University of London, Otis College of Art and Design Los Angeles, the Ruskin School of Art Oxford, the University of Copenhagen, the Berlin University of the Arts, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and the Academy of Arts Kassel.

Grace Period by Caroline Key and KyungMook Kim, 2015, 62 mins
*Los Angeles virtual premiere, playing May 20-23

PART 2: CAROLINE KEY
May 20-23, 2021
Tickets: https://watch.eventive.org/whatweimagine/play/608485aa845da400866aaa41
Suggested donation: $12 general, $8 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
All tickets include admission to the conversation with the artists premiering on May 27.

This program highlights two works by Brooklyn-based filmmaker and artist, Caroline Key, including the Los Angeles virtual premiere of her new short film KHÔRA, and her experimental documentary feature GRACE PERIOD, co-directed by KyungMook Kim in 2015.

As part of the artist’s ongoing interest in examining conditions and formations of alterity, these works are brought together in their various political and aesthetic expressions of refusal through a range of cinematic practices, including documentary non-fiction, experimental video, animation, and digital graphics. Within this space of refusal, issues of body sovereignty, gendered and sexualized labor, and economic precarity are brought to the fore as the artist negotiates what is both revealed and withheld within the frame. These themes and visual considerations work to ultimately deny the recorded image as an irrefutable source of evidence in maintaining institutional and state-sanctioned order and control. Rather than fully exposing or revealing her subjects, Key instead withholds, suspends, or obscures their images, often rendering them opaque as a means for us to imagine what is implicated in their visual absence.

In KHÔRA (2019), the artist utilizes “medical waste” footage from her experiences working as a hospital OBGYN surgical videographer to investigate the relationship between visibility, medical knowledge, and the production of an image economy that renders the intimate body as a knowable and circulated commodity. While details of the body undergoing surgical operation are blacked out through digital manipulation, the hard contours of the robotic, surgical tools remain within distorted view, exposing medicine’s technological intervention upon it. Combining these images along with lush and fleshy original 3D medical animation, obscured views of hospital corridors, and imagery alluding to Dr. Marion Sims and gynecology's problematic origins, Key presents a complex filmic inquiry into the knowability of the body within the medical gaze.

The artist’s considerations of visibility and opacity are further embodied in her earlier feature film GRACE PERIOD (2015). This experimental documentary depicts a group of sex workers in the Yeongdeungpo district in Seoul and their collective resistance to the accumulating effects of government crackdowns on their work and space as a result of South Korea’s Anti-Sex Trade Law. Drawing us away from the humanitarian impulses of traditional documentary filmmaking, the film utilizes various visual techniques and approaches to temporality that portray the women’s spaces of political protest and intimate sites of work with careful consideration. Throughout the film, the figures of the women are digitally rendered as flickering silhouettes while they are at work as an effort to maintain their physical presence, while honoring their anonymity. This obstruction of their image not only functions to protect their anonymity, but also serves to refuse the notion that one’s identity can be captured and held by an image. Instead, we are drawn to consider the conditions of violence and precarity that mark these women’s lives through the forces that always remain within and beyond the frame.

TRT: 69 mins
Caroline Key is a filmmaker and video installation artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Employing a range of cinematic practices- 16mm film, alchemical film processing, documentary, animation, and digital manipulation- her films and videos investigate the construction and negotiation of identities rooted in conditions of alterity. Her works have shown internationally in festivals and galleries, including the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, the Seoul Independent Film Festival, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and the Images Festival in Toronto. Caroline has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Sarah Jacobsen Film Grant, and the NYSCA/ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes. She received her MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts, her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Caroline teaches filmmaking at Rutgers University.

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Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the California Community Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2021 is our 46th year.

Coming Soon to Los Angeles Filmforum:
May 13-16, 2021: What We Imagine in Its Absence / Part 1: Vika Kirchenbauer
May 20-23, 2021: What We Imagine in Its Absence / Part 2: Caroline Key
May 27, 2021, 5:00 pm PDT: What We Imagine in Its Absence / Part 3: Conversation with Vika Kirchenbauer and Caroline Key

Dates To Come: Workshop with Lynne Sachs; Pandemic Films Open Call; and more!

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