7 May – ANTHROPOLOGY AS PERFORMANCE

Two multimedia performance-lectures by the DARKMATTER Collective. Mohamad Khezri Moghadam and dancer Saman will together do a performance piece based on an ethnographic photo series shot in Iran. Edward Akintola Hubbard and acclaimed Cabo Verdean acoustic musician Tcheka will together do a live performance piece.

The DARKMATTER Collective, a locally-based artist collective with direct, personal and ongoing intellectual interest in this ever-evolving, hybrid discipline of ethnography. DARKMATTER has an intimate connection to ethnography as an artistic practice. Its artistic director Edward Akintola Hubbard is an anthropologist and practitioner of experimental ethnography. He has taught the practice at New York University (New York and Shanghai campuses) and later at Utrecht University. Several of the co-founders of DARKMATTER were his students who went on to become practitioners themselves.

PROGRAMME

• THE THIRTEENTH DAY (BY MOHAMAD KHEZRI MOGHADAM) DARKMATTER’s Mohamad Khezri Moghadam will present a performance lecture in tandem with a slideshow of his ethnographic photo series The Thirteenth Day (shot near Kerman, Iran in 2019-2022). Iranian performance artist Hosein Danesh Pazhooh will interpret the images to the sound of Persian music.
  
  Four years ago, in a location near Moghadam’s hometown of Kerman, a group of amateur Shia artists began the construction of several very elaborate installations on a large public complex. The installations are composed of statues and mannequins that reconstruct different epic scenes during the day of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. The complex is now in a state of neglect as construction there had ceased since Iran’s Coronavirus lockdown and never resumed. Some of the statues have even begun to slowly disappear or be removed by local authorities.
  
  Shia Muslims believe that women have played a significant heroic role in the victory of Islam and this installation project was specifically intended to honour the women in battle during the day of the martyrdom. In every installation, however, the Shia artists chose to install hijab-clad male mannequins and statues to represent the female characters in the epic. The Thirteenth Day explores this instance of darkly comical irony, emblematic of the whole of Iranian society, that is produced by the imposition of sharia law since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
• TROPICAL CYBERPUNK (BY EDWARD AKINTOLA HUBBARD) DARKMATTER’s Edward Akintola Hubbard along with Angolan-Portuguese sound artist and performer Tristany Mundu will present a recitation of his experimental writing along with a slide-show of his most recent ethnographic photo series Tropical Cyberpunk (shot in Kingston Jamaica in 2023). The slideshow will provide the backdrop for Mundu’s avant-garde performance and sonic interpretations.
  
  Cyberpunkis a sub-genre of science fiction typically set in a dystopian future cityscape teeming with advanced technology, saturated with neon lights and plagued with crime, social inequality and crumbling infrastructure. The photo series Tropical Cyberpunk views Kingston and its environs through the lens of dystopian futurism. Part visual ethnography, part world-building, these images collectively re-imagine the city as a high-tech, otherworldly metropolis in all its beauty and squalor, nestled in lush vegetation and awash in iridescent hues.
  
  Tropical Cyberpunk is a critique of the post-colonial state and its failure to deliver on the utopian promise of national independence, but it is also a vibrant celebration of the creativity and resilience of the Jamaican people who continuously make and remake this dynamic, fast-moving and highly innovative urban culture.

30 April – Made in America

A celebratory evening dedicated to the great works of pioneering and contemporary African-American female directors. With a special introduction by Maya Cade, founder of Black Film Archive in New York.

These films disrupt traditional narratives and offer a multifaceted portrayal of Black womanhood and creativity, resisting the dominant subjectivity of the ‘cinema canon’.

Program

FOUR WOMEN (JULIE DASH, 1975, 7′)

In this experimental short by Julie Dash – which is one of the first experimental films by a Black woman filmmaker – dancer Linda Martina Young interprets the same-titled ballad by Nina Simone and embodies the spirits of four women: Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches. These women represent common stereotypes of Black women attempting to survive in America.

KILLING TIME (FRONZA WOODS, 1979, 9′)

In this offbeat, wryly humorous look at the dilemma of a suicidal woman unable to find the right outfit to die in, director Fronza Woods examines the personal habits, socialisation, and complexities of life that keep us going.

AMERICA (GARRETT BRADLEY, 2020, 29′)

America explores the intersection of race, history, and visual storytelling through a series of 12 silent, black and white films, starting from 1915 to 1926. America was inspired by the MoMA’s recent discovery of the earliest surviving footage for a feature film Lime Kiln Club Field Day, made by an interracial cast and crew for a Black audience. In the first quarter of the 20th century, 100 years ago, Black people and white people made films together with Black casts and narratives of joy. The majority of these films were lost or destroyed. Each of the 12 films represents one year and some ordinarily extraordinary things that happened in the United States.

TO BE FREE (ADEPERO ODUYE, 2017, 13′)

Late night in a jazz club, Nina Simone finds, for one moment, to be free. Actress, writer and director Adepero Oduye takes the stage as the great Nina Simone for an intimate and defiant performance. With stunning cinematography by Oscar-nominated Bradford Young.

23 April – ETHNOGRAPHIC LISTENING

Anthropological documentary experts Andrew Littlejohn and Ernst Karel discuss their area of expertise and the role of sound in ethnographic film. Later in the evening, there’s a chance to see Expedition Content, Karel’s critical look at the anthropologist and his subject.

Ernst Karel is a musician, anthropologist, phonographer and former manager of SEL, the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University) set up by Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The latter now features, together with Véréna Paravel, in the exhibition in Eye.

Andrew Littlejohn (SEL alumnus) will talk to Karel via live stream about the phenomenon of ‘sonic ethnography’: the study of peoples by means of audio recordings. Among others Littlejohn will discuss how people produce and know places and their inhabitants acoustically, how feedback loops exist between what people aurally perceive and what they understand as belonging to their worlds, and how the art of recording and presenting sound-based media can help us to appreciate these dynamics.

Littlejohn is an associate professor affiliated to Leiden University’s Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

Classic

Following this exchange of thoughts, Karel’s film Expedition Content (2020, with Veronika Kusumaryati) will screen: a critical look at the ethnographic classic Dead Birds (1963), about the Hubula people of Papua, western New Guinea. The latter film was directed by Robert Gardner, head of Harvard University’s Film Study Center.

Expedition Content explores the dynamics between anthropologists and their subjects, as well as the relationship between sound and imagination. The screen remains almost entirely dark; we hear a montage of audio recordings made by Michael Rockefeller, a member of Gardner’s expedition to study the Dani people in 1961 who disappeared without trace.

A separate ticket is required for Expedition Content.

Presented in collaboration with ReCNTR, Leiden University.

16 April – ALREADYMADE WITH BARBARA VISSER

Was it marketing, mystification or misogyny that made the ‘readymade’ work of art Fountain so famous? What started out as a lost object by an anonymous maker, became the most influential artwork of the 20th century. Barbara Visser will be present to talk with the audience about her findings.

Speculation about a female creator of the artwork Fountain (1917) come and go. But who is she? What is real, and what is true in this case? Doubts about the origin of this ‘readymade’ work of art fluctuate with the value of the countless copies held in the depots of modern art museums. Can the discovery of a single piece of correspondence change everything, attributing it to a woman way ahead of her time?

Q&A with the director Barbara Visser.

9 April – THE HORROR OF ANTHROPOLOGY + CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST

This lecture by Edward Akintola Hubbard is an intentionally weird introduction to the discipline of anthropology – by way of a critical examination of anthropological research as conventions of the horror film. Followed by Akin Hubbards film of choice: the controversial Cannibal Holocaust (1980).

Anthropologists have appeared as protagonists and key characters in many horror movies. Films like Horror Express (1973), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Candyman (1992) and The Relic (1997) have pitted the anthropologist against powerful spirits and demons, mutant beasts, malevolent sorcerers and ferocious cannibals.

While paying attention to the rich popular mythology that has grown up around the anthropologist and her/his work, Akintola Hubbard will use these films to closely examine the major disciplinary problems, anxieties and even phobias arising out of anthropology’s troubled place in the history of the West. Akintola Hubbard will look at the complimentary roles played by anthropological science and the horror genre in constructing, popularizing and sometimes challenging Western notions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship.

In this lecture, Edward Akintola Hubbard will engage in a gothic re-reading of anthropology as the ‘science of the Other’; consider the anthropologist as a liminal figure in popular culture – a hapless intermediary between science and superstition, between modernity and arcane tradition – who grapples methodologically with both rationalist and non-rationalist epistemes; examine cinematic representations of fieldwork as a terrifying, ill-advised crossing of social, cultural, geographic, and temporal boundaries; connect the themes of the course with current debates on imperialism, racism, classism, sexism, homo- and transphobia, racialized policing, immigration, and terrorism.

Cannibal Holocaust

After a break, Eye will screen Akin Hubbards film of choice for this evening: Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980). This film is a landmark in Italian exploitation cinema and remains one of the most controversial films ever made. A pioneer of the found footage cinematic technique, the film concerns an anthropologist who leads a rescue team into the Brazilian Amazon to find a crew of missing documentary filmmakers. To achieve a heightened sense of gory realism, Deodato employed deeply problematic methods which predictably led to outrage upon the release of the film. While not for the faint-hearted, Cannibal Holocaust is a cautionary tale about race, power and ethics in the representation of non-Western cultures.

The film contains graphic depiction of sexual assault and actual animal cruelty. Part of the proceeds will go towards De Dierenbescherming.

About Edward Akintola Hubbard

Experimental ethnographer Edward Akintola Hubbard is the artistic director of the DARKMATTER Collective. He has taught the practice at New York University (New York and Shanghai campuses) and later at Utrecht University.

2 April : PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN – FILMS & TALK

Much of Pauline Curnier Jardin’s work deals with the stereotypical role of women in mythology, history, folklore and cinema. Tonight she talks about her work with curator of the Centraal Museum Utrecht Laurie Cluitmans.

With her films, installations, performances, paintings and drawings, Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) creates fictional worlds. She immerses the viewer in a visually overwhelming universe in which a wide range of references are interwoven: from pagan rituals, Catholic processions and myths to carnival parades and horror films. Much of her work deals with the stereotypical role of women in mythology, history, folklore and cinema. With her work, Curnier Jardin does not offer solutions, but she confuses, disrupts and makes the viewer experience power structures differently. She holds up a mirror to us of human behavior in the not-so-distant past and in the present.Screening in collaboration with Centraal Museum Utrecht, where Curnier Jardin’s solo exhibition Hot Flowers, Warm Fingers can be seen until April 21 2024.

PROGRAMME

• FAT TO ASHES (PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN, 2021, 21′) Fat to Ashes combines three storylines, starting with a religious festival in honour of St. Agatha. According to legend, the Roman prefect Quintianus had Agatha tortured and her breasts amputated because she refused his advances, hence her position as Patron Saint of rape victims, breast cancer patients, wet nurses, and bell founders and a protector to victims of fire.
  
  The film cuts from Agatha’s festival to Cologne Carnival, a week of excess that runs from so-called ‘Fat Thursday’ until Ash Wednesday which marks the beginning of Lent and a period of reflection. The third line is the ritual slaughter of a pig in an Italian mountain village, on a dark, cold morning demonstrating vividly how agriculture becomes culture as living flesh becomes meat.

• ADORATION (PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN, 2022, 9′) Through drawings made by female prisoners, the film depicts, in collage style, the forgotten story of Casa di Reclusione Femminile, a Venetian women’s prison that used to house a convent. In the 16th century, sex workers and other women who did not conform to the social norm were forced to enter the convent. There, they performed annual plays for the Venetian elite as a way of making themselves heard. Adoration premiered at the Venice Biennale last year.

• AUSGEBLUTET, BLED OUT, QU’UN SANG IMPUR (PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN, 2019, 16′) Qu’un sang impur began as a loose remake of Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950), a homoerotic love story between prisoners, under the languorous eye of a sadistic prison guard. In Curnier Jardin’s film, shiny young male bodies are replaced by post-menopausal women, who celebrate their erotic vigour after ridding themselves of the patriarchal construct that takes them “off the market” (as writer Virginie Despentes would say).
  
  Having escaped the endless reproductive cycle, the artist ascribes a special power to this phase in women’s lives, disconnected as objects of desire. In their moment of need, they bleed again.

• FIREFLIES (PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN, 2021, 7′) A collaborative meditation on liminal spaces and desire. The film was developed together with the sex workers from the Feel Good Cooperative in Rome, which was co-initiated by the artist in an effort to provide financial assistance to sex workers during the pandemic.
  
  It was shot on the margins of the ancient imperial city. Long ago, there used to be fireflies there. Today, the headlights of cars act like searchlights, while suitors spot sex workers through erratic flashes of light. They in turn may be lit up by a flashlight directed at their invisible bodies, a brazier or little bonfire. In this instant, the mostly trans sex workers working and performing there are themselves reminiscent of fireflies.

26 March – LEVIATHAN AND THE ENTANGLED LIVES OF SPECIES

Artist duo Paravel & Castaing-Taylor – currently featured in the exhibition in Eye – submerge us in the harsh life of ocean fishermen. Introduced by a lecture from Mark Westmoreland, Associate Professor at Leiden University.

‘Spectacular’ is an understatement for what Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel achieved with their impression of life on a fishing boat setting out across the North Atlantic Ocean to fish in the exact location where Melville’s crazed captain Ahab pursued the white whale Moby Dick.

Raw poetry

The anthropologically trained pair of artists attached a dozen small GoPro cameras to both boat and crew. From the resulting hours of footage, the makers edited together an impression in raw poetry of life onboard a fishing vessel, showing the crew, the fish, the gulls and the waves all from an equal perspective.

The film premièred at the Locarno film festival in 2012, winning the international film critics’ FIPRESCI Prize ahead of a glorious run through countless festivals.

Special introduction

Preceded by a lecture (20′) by Mark Westmoreland, Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology at ReCNTR / Leiden University and co-editor of a special issue on Leviathan for the journal Visual Anthropology Review. He will give an extensive introduction to Leviathan, a film he describes as an ‘experimental post-humanist study of commercial fishing in the North Sea’.

Presented in collaboration with ReCNTR, Leiden University.

 

19 March – LARRY SIDER ON: HOW A SOUNTRACK OPERATES IN NARRATIVE FILMMAKING

How does a soundtrack operate in narrative filmmaking? In this talk, Director of the School of Sound in London, Sound Designer and Film Editor Larry Sider answers all your questions, illustrated with clips from films he has worked on, including the Quay Brothers’ Institute Benjamenta.

In this talk Larry Sider will introduce you to the structure of a soundtrack explaining the different components that are woven together with the image to create meaning and feeling. Using clips from films he has worked on (including Institute Benjamenta) as well as exercises he uses in teaching, he’ll play different types of soundtracks – straightforward effects, abstract sound, quiet moments, scenes with and without music – revealing how they direct the audience’s attention and understanding in different ways. With plenty of time for questions at the end.

Larry Sider

Larry Sider has been a sound designer, recordist and film editor for over thirty years in documentary, animation and fiction filmmaking. He has worked extensively with animators the Quay Brothers (Street of Crocodiles, Institute Benjamenta) and documentary filmmaker Patrick Keiller (London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins).

He is currently heads the MA in Film Sound at Goldsmiths (University of London). Since 1998, Larry has promoted the profile of sound in screen production as Director of the School of Sound International Symposium, a project exploring the use of sound across all the arts and media through online events, workshops and writing. From these meetings has come the book, Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures.

Moving Media LAB

This program is in collaboration with Cinedans in the context of the Moving Media LAB. The MML investigates the meaning and value of dance and movement in the autonomous arts, in design practice and in science with the aim of bringing about innovation and deepening of interdisciplinary creative working methods. Research, experiment, gathering and sharing knowledge, collaboration and broadening networks are core concepts of the project.

 

12 March – Ethnographic Landscapes

Anthropologist, filmmaker and theoretician J.P. Sniadecki talks to fellow anthropologist Cristiana Strava (Leiden University) about ethnographic cinema; with clips from Sniadecki’s films, two of which screen in the film programme accompanying the Paravel & Castaing-Taylor exhibition.

The pair will show clips from films and talk about topics such as interdisciplinary collaboration; the possibilities and impossibilities of anthropological and ethnographic cinema; how makers and researchers deal with the relationship between stories and images; what to do with the huge array of media available to you: analogue and digital recordings and audio documentation.

J.P. Sniadecki, an alumnus of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) set up by Lucien Castaing-Taylor whose films have screened at many festivals and prestigious (retrospective) exhibitions at MoMA, the Guggenheim and The Museum of Natural History, will be in conversation with anthropologist Cristiana Strava (ReCNTR / Leiden University). The presentation will include film and audio extracts.

Cristiana Strava is a social anthropologist who studied at Harvard University and obtained her PhD from the University of London. Her work includes the study of changing urban spaces and the forces that operate within these.

Discussing both El Mar la Mar (co-directed with Joshua Bonnetta, 2017, about life in the Sonoran Desert on the border of Mexico and the United States) and Foreign Parts (co-directed with Véréna Paravel, 2010, about plans for undesired new buildings in the Queens borough of New York), both of which also screen on 12 March, Sniadecki and Strava will explore collaboration, the relationships between stories and images, and the materiality of different media from analogue to digital and audio documentation.

Co-presented with ReCNTR, Leiden University.

5 March – MOVING ICE + SHAPESHIFTSH

5 March h 19.15 – MOVING ICE

An evening in collaboration with Sonic Acts around the theme of ice, with an audiovisual performance by Sébastien Robert and Mark IJzerman (with material from the Eye collection), the premiere of a new film by Susan Schuppli and a talk between Schuppli and Maria Rusinovskaya (Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts).

PROGRAMME

ANOTHER DEEP (TRY-OUT) (SÉBASTIEN ROBERT, MARK IJZERMAN, 25′, LIVE AV PERFORMANCE)
Another Deep is an immersive project that explores the impending deep-sea mining in the Svalbard region. The performance seeks to highlight the stark contrasts and inherent tensions present in the region, reflecting on matters such as climate change, industrialization, and resource exploitation. IJzerman and Robert aim to bring visibility to environmental, geopolitical, and indigenous impacts resulting from the mining operations and hope to facilitate a nuanced discussion around this largely unseen process.

Interdisciplinary artist Mark IJzerman navigates planetary processes such as eroding biodiversity and warming waters from more-than-human perspectives. Always informed by field research and creative collaboration, he uses digital technologies to create intimacy between us and the other-than-human.

As an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, Sébastien Robert’s practice unfolds at the intersection of visual and sound art, technology, science, and ethnography. Most of his projects revolve around a research cycle You’re No Bird of Paradise, through which he explores disappearing Indigenous sonic rituals and cosmologies. Produced in collaboration with V2_ (the Netherlands) and BEK (Norway).

MOVING ICE (SUSAN SCHUPPLI, 40′)
World premiere. A trans-hemispheric commerce in natural ice moved its crystal cargo along the well-established shipping routes of plantation economies and the spice trade, what came to be known as the “frozen water trade”. This film tells the story of how European and American merchants tried to cool the tropics through the financialisation of temperature. Shipping natural ice extracted from glaciers and winter lakes to colonial elites around the world. Sometimes using slave labour to unload ships. The moving of a melting commodity that lost its mass by almost a third upon arrival is now largely forgotten.

Susan Schuppli, a researcher and artist based in the UK, examines material evidence, corroborating material from war and conflict, as well as environmental disasters and climate change. Schuppli is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London where she is also an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. Co-commissioned by BEK (Norway), Sonic Acts (the Netherlands).

SUSAN SCHUPPLI IN CONVERSATION WITH MARIA RUSINOVSKAYA (20′)
Maria Rusinovskaya is curator, producer and director of BEK – Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts. From 2014 through 2020, she was Curator of Live Programme at Bergen Kunsthall, where she developed and presented a comprehensive programme with discursive series, music, and performance, and founded the one-day festival Poekahli and artists’ film and video series Zoom. Previously she worked as a curator and producer at Pikene på Broen and at the Murmansk Museum of Art in Russia.

5 March, h 21.30 – SHAPESHIFTS

An evening curated by Canal++ and presented in collaboration with Sonic Acts, with artists’ films by Shambhavi Kaul and Bo Wang. Kaul observes the ecosystems around an ancient ruin and Wang is tracing the material and ancestral ghosts of colonial and contemporary wig trade.

Depicting sonorous stones and shapeshifting hair, they conjure the many forms of sensorial debris that swirl together in the current world, no longer as relics, but as part of a complex assembly of life. As the ancient-future lives of these beings accumulate and conglomerate, the meanings of matter, decay, ruin, and trace all shift and reform in their own ways.The screening will be introduced by Jo-Lene Ong, and Bo Wang will be in conversation with Rachael Rakes and Julian Ross about his long-running body of work on the traces and hauntings of colonial pasts. Both works are Dutch premieres.

PROGRAMME

• SLOW SHIFT (SHAMBHAVI KAUL, 2023, 9’) Amid the ruins of the 14th-century city of Hampi in southwestern India – fabled site of the ancient Monkey Kingdom – troops of langurs observe a world in flux. Intercutting observational footage with constructed sequences, filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul in Slow Shift (2023, 9’) juxtaposes human, simian, and geologic timescales, marking a place where history, mythology, and nature conspire and collide. (NYFF)
  
  Shambhavi Kaul is an experimental filmmaker whose projects speculate on the possibilities for cinematic storytelling to build worlds. Her films make temporal and spatial demarcations porous by reorganizing cinematic space and layering historical, mythical, geological, ecological and cultural timescales. Eventually, audiences consider their own time and space in relation to survival, the environment and these filmic worlds. She has exhibited her work worldwide at film festivals such as the TIFl, Berlinale, New York, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, London, Oberhausen, and Experimenta Bangalore among others. She has presented her work at museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate, London. She has had two solo gallery shows at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. She was born in Jodhpur India, and lives in the United States where she is a professor at Duke University.
• AN ASIAN GHOST STORY (BO WANG, 2023, 37’) A cinematic and conceptually inventive film that explores the haunting memories of Asia’s late 20th-century modernization through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past. (CPH:DOX)
  
  The film has received awards at CPH:DOX, DOKLeipzig, Arkipel, Image Forum, Festival Entrevues Belfort, Curtocircuíto, and Sharjah Film Platform. Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including Guggenheim and MoMa, Garage Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, LUX & Open City Documentary Festival, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, DMZ Docs, Sharjah Film Platform and Sesc_Videobrasil, among others. He is a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam.
• BO WANG IN CONVERSATION WITH RACHAEL RAKES AND JULIAN ROSS (20’) Rachael Rakes is an independent curator and researcher. She is a selection committee member of the New York Film Festival, was artistic Director for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023) and is the editor of several publications on contemporary art, politics, and film. Julian Ross is co-programmer of Doc Fortnight 2024 and the Flaherty Seminar, and an Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. Together with Jo-Lene Ong, they are curators of Canal++, an Amsterdam-based film club.

Curated by Canal++ and presented in collaboration with Sonic Acts Biennial