Artists Space

Craig Baldwin in Conversation with Adam Khalil

Conversation
June 22, 2022, 7pm

In conjunction with the exhibition Attention Line, the maverick filmmaker Craig Baldwin is joined for a virtual conversation by his close friend, the filmmaker, artist, and core contributor of New Red Order, Adam Khalil. A prime catalyst in the Bay Area experimental film scene, and a significant figure in the global community of moving image artists, Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker and programmer without parallel. As the founder of Other Cinema, a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco's Mission District, Baldwin has contributed immeasurably to the art of cinema in its most extreme and subversive forms.

Craig Baldwin’s bold and paranoiac short and feature films combine newly shot footage with a vast trove of archival materials excised from discarded educational and industrial films. Baldwin’s cinematic agenda is to uncover truths that are lies and to spin tall tales out of rumors. Whether he’s crafting essayistic film exposés about the CIA in the Congo, dramatizing the plight of L. Ron Hubbard on the moon, or explaining how the band Negativland got sued by disc jockey Casey Kasem, Baldwin presents his viewers with imagery that seems to explain everything while at the same time confusing everything else.

The event coincides with a retrospective of Baldwin's films, presented in the downstairs cinema at Artists Space from June 15 – 25th. Attention Line also features Baldwin's Stolen Movie (1976) and a retrospective survey of Other Cinema flyers and ephemera.

A black and white photo of three figures. The faint circular outline of a clock face surrounds the middle one, who is wearing a suit and a helmet.
Craig Baldwin, Spectres of the Spectrum (still), 1999. [A black and white photo of three figures. The faint circular outline of a clock face surrounds the middle one, who is wearing a suit and a helmet.]

[Two men are having a conversation over their computers. On the left, one man is wearing small rectangular glasses and speaking, and has wavy gray hair. On the right, another man is wearing a baseball cap and over-the-ear headphones, and has a small beard and mustache.]

Adam Khalil, a member of the Ojibway tribe, is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, whose practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of image-making through humor, relation, and transgression. Khalil is a core contributor to New Red Order and a co-founder of COUSINS Collective. Khalil’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Arts Center, Lincoln Center, Tate Modern, HKW, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Toronto Biennial 2019 and Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions. Recent exhibitions have been held at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen and Spike Island in Bristol. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including but not limited to a 2021 Creative Capital Award, Herb Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Jerome Artist Fellowship, Cinereach and the Gates Millennium Scholarship.

This project is made possible with funds from the NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: MAAF Forward Fund, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Program support is provided by Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, The Cy Twombly Foundation, The David Teiger Foundation, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, Imperfect Family Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, The Willem de Kooning Foundation, The Fox Aarons Foundation, Herman Goldman Foundation, The Destina Foundation, The Luce Foundation, May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Arison Arts Foundation, The David Rockefeller Fund, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, The Jill and Peter Kraus Foundation, The Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation.