OKTA Collective presents: Summoning, including an online exhibition and film screening curated by Dovile Aleksaite, Lucy Kerr, and Alisi Telengut. The program features international artists working in film, video, writing, painting and photography, and revolves around witchcraft, ritual, and enchantment. The events are based on the premise of the “witch” as it relates not only to women, but also to queerness, wilderness, and pre-modernist and non-Eurocentric belief systems.
Through explorations of the body and the horizon that orients and disorients it, questions of memory, ancestry, and the rituals that sustain them, the films explore, transnationally, a collective grasping at the buried, the invisible, the unknowable. Featuring film/video work by Zoe Aiano, Yen-Chao, Stephanie Barber, Chiara Faggionato, Jurgis Lietunovas, and Mateo Vargas, followed by a live-streamed discussion with screening and exhibition artists.
Including:
Imam pesmu da vam pevam/I Have a Song to Sing You, Zoe Aiano, Video, 05:40 min
500 años después, Mateo Vargas, video, 06:54 min
another horizon, Stephanie Barber 2020 16mm 9 minutes
Non Fictional Tale (NFT), Jurgis Lietunovas, 06:46 min
The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay, Yen-Chao Lin, 11:02 min
AJAW Q’IJ, Chiara Faggionato, 15 min
Online Screening Featured Works:
Imam pesmu da vam pevam/I Have a Song to Sing You, Zoe Aiano, Video, 05:40 min
At age 6, Ivanka was chosen by fairy women to fall into trance to enter the realm of the dead and learn secrets about the future. At age 60, the spirits left her.
Divlja Kruška/Wild Pear Arts is an organisation founded by Alesandra Tatic, Greta Rauleac and Eluned Zoe Aiano. Based in Serbia, it produces a variety of socially motivated artistic projects throughout the Balkans, often focussing on feminism, witchcraft and the intersection between socio-political forces and everyday experiences.
500 años después, Mateo Vargas, video, 06:54 min
A short city symphony evocation of present day Mexico City five hundred years after the invasion of the Spanish and the fall of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.
Mateo Vargas is a queer non-binary Mexican filmmaker and visual artist based in Mexico City. Their multi-media work has screened internationally and focuses on the intersections of identity, borders, and diaspora under the dual legacies of colonialism and late-stage capitalism.
another horizon, Stephanie Barber 2020 16mm 9 minutes
The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, is a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart. here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is literally scratched between two voices, also cleaved apart or brought beside. jayne love reads a text i wrote for her––short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of richard (oswan) williams' beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me. i lived, for a few months, in richard, and his wife mary’s, apartment, the site of their voodoo spiritual temple in new orleans. of course, as priests and priestesses richard and mary spoke often of death, transcendence, ethics and health. our days were slow and filled with philosophical rumination, richard, a brilliant old man schooling a young wandering wonderer. i recorded most everything on cassette tapes back then and some of those have made it here to the present. to this horizon we’re at now.
Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic works. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and non-human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com. Her haiku collection Status Update Vol. 1 was published in the fall of 2019 by CTRL+P and her full length play Trial in the Woods was published by Plays Inverse in August 2021.
Non Fictional Tale (NFT), Jurgis Lietunovas, 06:46 min
When we’re walking on the street or in the forest and we decide to pick up a strange object or a beautiful rock, we enter a moment of fragility, our self becomes porous and we've just crossed into the liminal zone between ourselves and the other. What gets lost is our past self as we form yet another connection in our mind. We lose and we gain. But what if we looked at this moment the other way around, and would instead say that something discovered us, lured us in, guided us, and helped to solidify who we are by making it evident what we look at? Let us imagine that we’re next to someone who is stepping into a lived-in cave, touching its walls and appreciating the history that they have witnessed, let us listen as they lean down to pick up a rock to tell us how they feel about it.. And finally, let’s become porous to nature’s way of speaking to us and absorb its simple gifts, as we're resting from a hard day of work or maybe instead, what we call - existence.
Jurgis Lietunovas a Graphic Design graduate from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam tunes in to listening to objects that on first sight seem to have no agency or voice, diving into what feels like another ontological realm - a surreal parallel track that runs like a shadow behind the ordinary every day. He’s interested in presence that is not strictly physical but, rather something that exists in time. It can be presence of feelings, memory, history or a whisper of an inanimate object. He researches the above mentioned by re-creating real places in CGI and enacting “interpreted” scenarios or stories to build a present emotional dimension that hopefully sheds some light on contemporary narratives of myth making.
The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay, Yen-Chao Lin, 11:02 min
Shot on location in the traditional Amis territory, The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay travels through villages on the east coast of Taiwan, where nature, colonization and population migration merge to create a unique spiritual landscape. The hand processed super 8 unravels mixed faith expressions from Daoist ritual possession to Presbyterian funeral, from personal prayers to collective resistance, all the while attempting to trace the memories of past Amis sorcerers.
Yen-Chao Lin 林延昭 is a Taipei-born Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. A self-described postmodern archivist and natural history enthusiast, her work explores divination arts, occult sciences, oral history, religion, power and social permaculture through means of intuitive play, craft techniques, collaboration, scavenging and collecting. Her current research is focused on dowsing, psychic mapping and Feng Shui.
AJAW Q’IJ, Chiara Faggionato, 15 min
The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) declared that the Christian Easter would be celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon of spring. Spring begins between the 20th and the 21st of March, coinciding with the astronomical Equinox. Thus, in Guatemala, two festivities of two different cultures and spiritualties are celebrated at the same time.
Chiara Faggionato is an Italian visual artist, photographer and filmmaker currently based in Berlin, where she is currently a MFA student at the Art in Context Institut - UdK. Her visual projects are researched-based and reflect on the separation between man and nature - culture and nature, as result of the capitalist and catholic western society.
Online Exhibition Featured Works:
Cloud and rain behind the glass (diptych), Daniele Bongiovanni, 50x50 cm each, oil on canvas, 2021
The work is inspired both by philosophy (Aesthetic Philosophy), but above all by the fairy tale of the evocation of rain: the arrival of rain ''beyond the glass'' perceived by cats. There is a fictional story about this, in practice in the distant past cats were welcomed in the village of Tashirojima (Japan) with the aim of evoking rain.
Unexplainable Series - I am Here, Iryna Calinicenco, New Media, Canvas Size: 60 W x 80 H cm
Alternate universes. For example, in quantum mechanics, particles have no definite properties as long as no one is looking at them. This idea is metaphorically portrayed in Schroedinge's cat paradox - where the cat, sitting in a box, is both alive and dead until you open the box to check. Your action turns the cat alive or dead. Sometimes I feel the powers that be bother me.... But I can't keep quiet!
Keepers, Sergei Dobrunov, size 30/40 centimeters, oil, glass, ink, 2021
This work shows the angels who protect the peace of mankind. This work uses the technique of layering paint to create effects.
Jessie, Christopher Gambino, short text. Untitled, Christopher Gambino, 35mm photograph
Jessie is a short story about an eBay listing for a haunted doll that I saw in 2018. I couldn’t stop thinking about her spirit being trapped in a little plastic thing, so I wrote this for her. I did not buy her, but maybe that’s for the best. Untitled (Jonathan putting on his elf ears) is a 35mm photograph I took of my partner on Halloween while we were getting ready to go to a party. He’s dressed as an apprentice to a dark elven priestess- I was dressed as the dark elven priestess.
Diseases on tree trunks, text. Prenuptial Agreement, drawing,Tobias König.
The text "Diseases on tree trunks" and the drawing "prenuptial agreement" are set in relation here. Both the text and the drawing play with the identification of medieval myths about romance, gender and descriptions of nature. The phantasm in the exaltation of Romanticism underlies the works.
Transatlantic Journey, Mazenett Quiroga, two-channel video, 3:15 min
Action/ritual of collecting soil from the Amazon rainforest and pouring it back into the desert. These two opposing places depend on each other to flourish and are invisibly interconnected: tons of sand from the desert travel thousands of kilometers to America, carrying with it phosphorus, which fertilizes the soil of the Amazon.
The Dark Hours, Henriette von Muenchhausen, 2021 Gouache and tempera on black paper 29,7 x 21cm
Dark Hours, I summon you. Lay your glowing fingers on my cheeks and whisper the words only me and you know. They won't comfort me now, but their presence will linger on and remind me of the lizards I found long ago.
Birdmen, Eva Pedroza, 2016 3-channel video installation. HD, color, sound
In Birdmen the focus is set on the infinite possibility of transformation and reinvention. By using the morph technique on fusible materials, as well as the endless loop in which the videos are played backwards and forwards; past, future and present merge into a chance of time-free transformation.
Panopticonthera Subobscura, Marco Schmitt, video, 17:43 min
Through a spiritual ritual, the indigenous shaman Jaguar Nocturno calls the aztec god Tezcatlipoca, in the form of a flying drone into presence. It arrives from the sun and dives towards the ouroboros temple. The drone becomes a spiritual tool of the shaman and flies away through the future past.
My Selves Dissolving, Danielle Wakin, 16mm, color, sound, 30min
My Selves Dissolving travels through the sensations during out-of-body experiences. Themes of dissociation are explored such as: sleep paralysis, autoscopy, and ecstatic moments. The abstracted images are visual adaptations of experiences that reflect the energy inside the unexplainable. This film was made possible by the 2019 Alison Doerner Fund for Women Pioneers in Filmmaking
A Prayer for Santa Colonia, Tina Wilke, Full HD Video with 3D models, 01:41 min, 2019/202
Developed within a residency at Montevideo, Uruguay, this piece of digital syncretism examines anticolonial and indigenous struggle and their relation to the myths and official narratives of the Nation State and its heroes. Interrelating these narratives and figures within a 3D video collage, the resulting polymorphic figures and sounds envisions today´s popular saints.
Putrefactio, Alejandro Zertuche, 2019 fotoperformance (3)
The "Frágil" project is developed as an objectual, symbolic and performative investigation around obsidian stones. That addresses the properties contained in it such as its sound or its very formation from a mystical as well as political position, the idea of the mirror, the heterotopia and the energetic movements through its use.
Dislocation Blues (17 minutes, digital video, 2017)
A Dislocated Wild (online publication)
"An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become." (Sky Hopinka)
Accompanied by A Dislocated Wild
The Fourfold, Alisi Telengut, video, 7 min, 2020
Other Talking, Dovile Aleksaite, video, 5 min, 2019
Beneath The Pressure Of The Sky, Evan Meaney, hacked video files, 10 min, 2008
The three works explore various approaches to the animated, enchanted nonhuman – one in which we are in a multifold relationship with, always affecting and affected by, transforming collectively – sympoetically. Through mesmerizing experimental techniques, the films render objects, living entities, environments, and technologies as active agents with whom we share a larger system.
Based on the ancient animistic beliefs and shamanic rituals in Mongolia and Siberia, , by Alisi Telengut, is an exploration of the indigenous worldview and wisdom. With hand-crafted imagery, it is a testament of reclaiming animism for environmental ethics and non-human materialities. In Dovile Aleksaite’s work, , Aleksaite creates a point of view from an enchanted other whose identity and wishes are hard to grasp. It is a narration about people and nature correlation, climate change, coexistence with the other, refusal of anthropocentric thought, and a wish to live longer. Meaney’s work, , elicits its own alien, yet familiar, presence that has emerged from a network of surveillance into a robust technological subjectivity. The film is composed of impressionistically shifting images of the sky and the corporations that exploit it – hacked video files from airports.
James Benning, two moons, 42 min, USA 2018
James Benning is an independent filmmaker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Benning has been making films and installations for over 40 years and has made a considerable contribution to American experimental cinema.
Prior his REDCAT screening in 2019, Benning gave a sneak preview to the audience:“For two moons, you see the same thing twice. But it’s not the same.”
This isn’t the first time Benning, who studied Math prior to Filmmaking, has captured a repeated phenomena. Benning’s films have included, 10 Skies, 13 Lakes, and Two Cabins, among other collections. In two moons, Benning films both a gibbous and a full moon rising. Though filmed only one night apart, the first gibbous moon rises in an initial cloudy blue and a concluding lilac twilight and the full moon rises, more directly, up through darkness. Benning described in an email to us:
“Each night the moon on the average rises 45 minutes later than the night before. And each night the moon rises in a different place, as much as 30 degrees. The two shots were filmed from the exact same location, but the camera was pointed at slightly different angles due to the moon’s shifting positions.”
Though the moon, dependable, rises according to schedule, Benning’s film illuminates how the moon is constantly transformed by the nebulous environment that cradles it. Claude Monet painted, twenty five times, haystacks at different times of day and in different seasons. In Les Meules à Giverny, this constant subject, without variation, is portrayed through endless variation in its surrounding light and weather.
The moon is also an object dependent on forces outside of it, in order to rise and fall according to the mathematics described by Benning. Perhaps, now, during the time of the pandemic, this constant cycle of sun and moon rising and falling in our day to day life feels repetitious and relentless. However, cosmic relationships are no doubt more complex and fragile than they seem. We know now more than ever that cannot underestimate our interconnectedness.
All The Little Souvenirs was presented at Now Instant Image Hall in Fall 2019, featuring Blue and Cedar Rose by Kersti Jan Werdal, The Present by Robert Frank, and Palms by Mary Helena Clark. Curated by Now Instant, Kersti Jan Werdal, and Lucy Kerr. With a talk by Lucy Kerr on the program.
Ever-multiplying ways to touch and transmit during a global pandemic, Time is Out of Joint is a three-part exhibition that iterates across three different platforms: internet (digital), building (physical), and box (postal).
building: The physical exhibition took place at MAK Center for Art and Architecture’s Mackey Apartments, and was fractured into three different shows that spread across nine weeks from September 3 -- October 31, 2020. Every three weeks, an entirely new exhibition, featuring ten different artists, was installed for public viewing.
internet: An interactive digital exhibition was published alongside each new installation at MAK Center for Art and Architecture. The digital exhibition hosted launch events, film screenings, and complex digital translations of each participating artists’ work.
box: A limited edition “unbound publication” was produced in conjunction with each of the three Time is Out of Joint exhibitions. Each “unbound publication” contains ten artworks, many of which are sculptural and were created as either multiples or limited edition originals, in relation to the work exhibited at MAK Center for Art and Architecture. The box set, which was produced in an edition of 30+10 AP, blurs the line between exhibition catalogue and experimental mobile group show.
A 7 week performance and film festival at Brooklyn Studios for Dance curated and presented by Lucy Kerr and Emily Smith in partnership with BkSD with collaborating organizations Mono No Aware and Dance Films Association. This program questioned necessary conditions for a genre of dance film and fostered a dialogue around the potential of performance and dance in cinema to reflect on the body as a multifaceted social, political, and temporal vehicle of human experience.
September 30th 2017: OPENING NIGHT PROGRAM AND PARTY
Program included:
‘House Fuck’ (16mm) by Lyra Hill
‘The Insides of the Body in Grief’ (16mm, Super 8mm) by Lucy Kerr
‘Plush’ (digital video) by Emily Smith
‘Definition of an Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit’ (16mm) by Jessie Wright
October 14th 2018: LOCAL ARTISTS PROGRAM
Program included:
‘Enduring Ornament’ (16mm) by MM Serra and Josh Lewis
‘Full Music Video’ from ‘Another Fucking Warhol Production’ (digital video) by Raja Kelly a.k.a. The Feath3r Theory
‘A Story About A Sweater I Wanted’ (digital video) by Christopher Watkins
‘To The Deep’ (digital video) by Stefanie Koseff
‘MEMORY KEEP(H)ER: Claudette I’ (digital video) by Jasmine Hearn and Paul Kruse
‘Fake’ (digital video) by Alex Romania
‘Anchors of Iridescence’ (digital video) by Kayla Farrish
‘Gravitas’ (digital video) by Arantxa Araujo
‘Slow Shapes’ (digital video) by Kersti Jan Werdal
‘Josephine Marilyn Ana Bey’ (digital video) by Brittany Reeber and Lucy Kerr
‘kym and laurel’ (Super 8mm) by Laura Bartczak
‘Religion’ (digital video) by Qween Amor
October 21st: INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS PROGRAM
Program included:
‘My Body Is My Home’ by Sara Madandar (video and performance piece)
‘O, Persecuted’ by Basma Alsharif (digital video)
‘Her Silent Seaming’ by Nazli Dinçel (16mm)
‘My Tears Are Dry’ by Laida Lertxundi (16mm)
‘Nobody Here But Me: Autospectre Sector’ by Eryka Dellenbach (16mm)
‘Interrupta’ by Carla Forte (digital video)
‘Mama’s Boi’ by Local Honey (digital video)
‘Miles’ by Roza Savelyeva (01.21.17.) (digital video)
‘Alexa‘ made for Monika Czyżyk’s BOdyssey project by Charlotte Forsgård (digital video)
October 29th: MASCULINITY IN CRISIS
Program Included:
‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ by Mark Leckey (1999)
‘Beau Travail’ by Claire Denis (2000)
November 4th: BKSD x MONO NO AWARE
“Based in Brooklyn, NY, MONO NO AWARE presents monthly artist-in-person screenings, organizes affordable analogue filmmaking workshops, facilitates equipment rentals, operates a film distribution initiative, plans cinema field trips, and hosts an annual exhibition for contemporary artists and international filmmakers whose work incorporates Super 8mm, 16mm, 35mm or altered light projections as part of a live performance or installation.”
Program Included:
‘Muerto Por Favor’ by Chantal Calato (16mm to digital)
‘SSS’ by Henry Hills (16mm to digital)
‘All The Beautiful Girls’ (VHS to digital) by Amanda Justice
‘EIGHT’ by Juliana Cerqueira Leite (projected in 16mm)
‘live-evil’ by Mads Kristian Frøslev (16mm to digital)
‘Fantômas’ by Shane Fleming (projected in 16mm)
‘A Letter to M’ by Ellie Parker (16mm to digital)
‘Stress Drop’ by Brighid Greene (projected in Super 8mm)
‘Naiads’ Silver Hour’ by Columbine Macher (16mm to digital)
November 11th: BKSD x DANCE FILMS ASSOCIATION
Featuring a program of artists from the DFA archive co-curated by Kerr and Smith.
‘NAKED’ by Eiko and Koma (digital video)
‘Teresa Is Not A Mermaid’ by Yara Travieso (digital video)
‘The Sleepers’ by Kathy Rose (digital video)
‘Orange Trill‘ by Anthony Svatek (16mm)
‘Laid in Earth’ by Yara Travieso (digital video, installation)
‘Villanelle’ by Hayat Hyatt (digital video and archival footage, documentary)
‘A Body on Wall Street‘ by Eiko Otake (digital video)
SHE’ by Kathy Rose (digital video)
‘Dizzy’ by Frank Conversano (digital video)
‘Ballroom Boys’ by Michael Stylianou (digital video, documentary)
‘SAMBA #2′ by Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner (digital video)
November 19th: RECONFIGURING THE APPARATUS
Program included:
‘Prologue to BOdyssey’ by Monika Czyzyk (digital video)
‘the sky too thinks of you’ by Lucy Kerr (digital video and performance piece)
‘The Quivering Sun’ by Christopher Watkins
STUDENT INITIATIVE: FILM/VIDEO CURATING
PRESENTS
Fri Jan 18 |4:00-7:00 PM|
Bijou Auditorium, California Institute of the Arts
Free and Open to the entire Institute
Our house:
So rebellious an object
A first of two student-curated programs to be presented during the Winter Break in Film Today, Our House explores ideas around the question of what is film, today? By taking to parallel roads (that will, of course, cross at infinity). One of the paths goes inside and out the house to apprehend everything that is in it, visible and invisible. The other one bumps into a series of beings mistaken as objects, and to this they resist. The selection for this session brings an eclectic group of filmmakers including Octavio Cortazar, Sara Cymwar, Kevin Jerome Everson, Oskar Fischinger, Laida Lertxundi, Ted Fent, Nazlı Dinçel, Lilli Carre and a mysterious family.
Nazlı Dinçel:
Between Relating and Use
(Argentina/USA, 2018, 9 min)
Kevin Jerome Everson:
Brown and Clear
(USA, 2017, 7:40 min)
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold:
Fastest Man in the State
(USA, 2017, 10 min)
Lilli Carré:
Jill
(USA, 2016, 6:49 min)
Ted Fendt:
Broken Specs
(USA, 2012, 6 min)
Oskar Fischinger:
Walking from Munich to Berlin
(Germany, 1927, 5 min)
Laida Lertxundi:
Cry When it Happens
(USA, 2010, 14 min)
Sara Cwynar:
Soft Film
(USA, 2016, 7 min)
Octavio Cortázar:
Por primera vez (For the First Time)
(Cuba, 1967, 10 min)
My House
( 4 min)
What seems to be a family is gathered in their living room to sing a song about, perhaps about their lives.
Note From the Curators
As we once were strangers to one another (and then we got together in a room and started to think) we invite you now to our house to get acquainted. The house is made out of nine films and has two rooms. In the first one you will sit down and stop trying to imagine how it was to watch a film for the first time, as you are actually going to see it happen, you can take an extremely long walk that will let you be a part of everything you come across in it, you can go back to where you never were and run as fast as you will ever run and see what the sunset reveals and hides in close but far locations (if you want, you can cry during). In the second room you will find a group of beings that have been mistaken by objects and are starting a revolt, first silent then pretty loud. Empty will become full of community-building liquids, a rude order will be resisted with a full body and silently answered with perhaps a “fuck you”, softness will become sharp and the past will be interchanged with the future, a pair of glasses will break your hart and, while you think, plants will have opportunities for orgasms. The house will be warm and you are invited.