Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA

[...], A film programme, curated by Astria Suparek 
Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024, 2–5 p.m 

Screening with work by David Blandy, Jesse Chun, Camille Henrot, Jonelle Twum, Suneil Sanzigiri & Lu Yang

Part of the 2024 Film Series introducing 52 films and time-based works by 48 directors and artists in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater.

Still: Visions of the Deep Past, David Blandy, 2020. Commissioned for Brent 2020: London Borough of Culture, with support from Arts Council England

Join us for the 2024 Carnegie Museum of Art Film Series programmed by artist and curator Astria Suparak. Each month, gather in our Art Theater for an afternoon of film featuring a curated combination of forms, ranging from feature-length narratives and documentaries to music videos, formalist experiments, animation, and internet memes. The selections date from 1920s avant-garde cinema to a new collage video created for the series.

The 2024 Film Series introduces 52 films and time-based works by 48 directors and artists in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater. For all programs in the series, Suparak has included artwork from the museum’s collection, which will either be incorporated into the curated line-up, featured in our galleries, or on view in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater during museum hours preceding the scheduled screening. Each screening will open with a brief introduction from a featured artist, writer, or scholar to provide expanded context into the program.

Program

• Wrathful King Kong Core*
  (Lu Yang, 2011, 5 min.)

• I THINK OF SILENCES WHEN I THINK OF YOU
  (Jonelle Twum, 2023, 9 min.)

• O dust
  (Jesse Chun, 2022–2023, 7:27 min.)

• Golden Jubilee
  (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021, 19 min.)

• Visions of the Deep Past
  (David Blandy, 2020, 4:30 min.)

• Grosse Fatigue
  (Camille Henrot, 2013, 13 min.)

[...], Notes from guest film programmer, Astria Suparak

Language is woefully insufficient. “The limits of language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein). Intonation can reverse the meaning of a phrase, and there are ways to communicate without words. “Loud silences of pain, defiance, endurance, poetics. A silence that sings refusal,” observes Jonelle Twum.

Speech trailing off, indicating words left unsaid; perhaps doubt setting in… Lapses of time, a pause (dot, dot, dot) An indeterminate amount of words omitted or disappeared […]

“What is liberation when so much has already been taken?” asks Suneil Sanzgiri’s father. He tours a virtual rendering of their ancestral home created with the same technology used by mining companies before their toxic extraction in the region.

Other phantoms: culture that can’t be touched, can’t be held, evoked by Jesse Chun’s sojourn through the Intangible Heritage archives, interspersed with a letter to her late grandmother. Camille Henrot mashes up the most common form of myth, usually orally passed down, of how the universe formed. Origin stories followed by cataclysms, with a world after humans visualized by David Blandy in collaboration with teenagers and young adults in North West London. And the world starts anew, again. Elliptical, ellipses.

“We are here because you were there.” Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s aphorism is an evergreen explanation of migration that is a legacy of colonialism.

Sites include: the filmmakers’ ancestral lands in Ghana and Goa, the Intangible Heritage archives of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in Paris, the collection storage of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the roleplaying game The World After.

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Carnegie Museum of Art Film Series

Filmmakers and Artists

• Ana Hušman

• Anthony Banua-Simon

• Ashley Hans Sheirl and Ursula Pürrer

• Astria Suparak

• Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

• Camille Henrot

• Charles Dekeukeleire

• Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

• David Blandy

• Doplgenger

• Fethi Sahraoui

• Haig Aivazian

• Ivan Ladislav Galeta

• Ja’Tovia Gary

• Jacolby Satterwhite

• Jesse Chun

• Jon Bois

• Jonelle Twum

• Jordan Wong

• Judy Fiskin

• Karen Luong

• Keith Piper

• Lawrence Lek

• Lillian Schwartz

• Lu Yang

• Markus Scherer

• May Maylisa Cat

• Miryam Charles

• Nam June Paik

• Paper Rad

• Paul Glabicki

• Peter Campus

• Raphael Montañez Ortiz

• Sim Hahahah

• Sondra Perry

• Suneil Sanzgiri

• Takashi Ito

• Terence Nance

• Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

• Thom Anderson

• Tintin Cooper

• Tony Buba

• Tony Cokes

• Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn

• William Wegman

Curator: Astria Suparak is based in Oakland, California. Her cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues (like institutionalized racism, feminisms, and colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Straddling creative and scholarly work, the projects often take the form of publicly available tools and databases, chronicling subcultures and omitted perspectives.

Suparak’s creative projects have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; and as part of the For Freedoms billboard series. Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award and was the curator of what is now the Miller ICA, Pittsburgh, from 2008–2014.

Carnegie Museum of Art
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Pittsburgh, PA 15213