Screening
April 22, 2006, 4:30pm
This program is presented as a part of Saturday Events, a series of individual events—lectures, conversations, and screenings—presenting artistic practices that exceed the confines of the exhibition but are considered an integral aspect of its premise.
Jenny Perlin: Associated, 16mm, b/w, sound, 12:25, 2006.
Filmed at my neighborhood corner store, a former Associated supermarket, from opening to closing on July 4, 2004 (Independence Day, U.S.). One roll of 16mm film shot every two hours or so reveals little except the unchanging patterns of the 14 hour workday. Interview with owner Charles Leem reflects on the history of his store and his favorite musicians.
Annemarie Jacir: like twenty impossibles, 35mm, color, 17 mins (2003).
Occupied Palestine: A serene landscape now pockmarked by military checkpoints. When a Palestinian film crew decides to avert a closed checkpoint by taking a remote side road, the political landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. Both a visual poem and a narrative, like twenty impossibles wryly questions artistic responsibility and the politics of filmmaking, while speaking to the fragmentation of a people.
John Menick: Occupation, 24 p DV, color, Stereo, 21 min (2006) with French and English subtitles
Occupation is a short narrative portrait of Malik, a homeless Senegalese postcard salesman living in Aubervilliers, France. Malik lives out of his car; his existence has hardened into a circular routine of urban exploration by night and the selling of his self-made postcards by day. The cards are the result of his travels through the peripheral spaces of the Aubervilliers. Avoiding typical touristic cityscapes, Malik's postcards focus on highway overpasses, disused factories, and housing projects. The film shows one day and night in Malik's life, a life that is both entangled with his host city and permanently pushed to its margins.