LOS ANGELES—The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) announces the MOCA Artist Film Series, a program of monthly screenings and conversations inspired by contemporary film and video works in MOCA’s collection. MOCA Artist Film Series will offer engaging and notable evenings with MOCA collection artists, as well as other contemporary artists who are making exceptional and innovative work in moving image mediums.
“MOCA is excited to create this active and dynamic platform for artists working in film and video today, and the conversations their works inspire,” said Clara Kim, MOCA Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs. “More than ever, artists are exploring new terrain and experimenting with the possibilities of the moving image, especially in long-form, narrative, and feature-length films.”
Held in the Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand Avenue, screenings will feature recent works, as well as works in MOCA’s collection, and be accompanied by conversations with artists, historians, and critics in dialogue about the state of filmmaking and the intersections of art and film today. Centered in Los Angeles, the cinema capital of the world, these programs will explore the broader critical issues of time and place.
MOCA Artist Film Series will be presented in conjunction with Together Thursdays, which offers extended hours at both museum locations until 8pm. Together Thursdays features free admission and free public programming, including music, performance, panels, and talks.
MOCA Artist Film Series Spring/Summer 2023 Schedule
All events take place in the Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand Avenue, unless otherwise stated. Dates and information subject to change; please confirm with Eva Seta at [email protected].
All screenings are free with RSVP via moca.org.
Martine Syms, The African Desperate, 2022
Thursday, March 16, 2023
The electrifying feature debut from renowned MOCA collection artist Martine Syms, The African Desperate brings her razor-sharp satire and vivid aesthetic invention to a riotous coming-of-age comedy. The film tracks one very long day for Palace Bryant (an expertly deadpan Diamond Stingily), a newly minted MFA grad whose final 24 hours in art school become a real trip. Palace is not going to the fucking graduation party! She hates the woods. If this were a reality show, she would be the person who was not here to make friends. Palace needs to get home, back to Chicago from upstate New York. But that means surviving a hazy, hilarious, and hallucinatory night-long odyssey, stumbling from academic critiques to backseat hookups.
Syms will be in conversation with writer and curator Essence Harden.
Sky Hopinka, A selection of recent films
Sunflower Siege Engine, 2022; Kicking the Clouds, 2021; Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, 2021; Lore, 2019; and When you’re lost in the rain, 2018
Thursday, March 30, 2023
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and
raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and
Riverside, Portland, and Milwaukee. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape–designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media. On this special evening, MOCA will be screening five short films by Hopinka.
Hopinka will be in conversation with art critic Jonathan Griffin.
Alison O’Daniel, The Tuba Thieves, 2013–22
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Los Angeles premiere
From 2011 to 2013, tubas were stolen from twelve high schools in Southern California. When reporters told the story, they focused on the thieves and asked the same questions: Who is doing this? Why? What is happening to the tubas? They did not seem curious about what a marching band sounds like without the lowest sound. They did not wonder what the tuba players were now doing in class. No one asked what happens when sound is stolen or lost, owned or delegated. The Tuba Thieves starts from these questions. It is a film about listening, but it is not tethered to the ear. It is a film about Deaf gain, hearing loss, and the perception of sound in Los Angeles – by animals, plants, and humans. From 2013-2018, scenes from the film were produced and exhibited internationally at film festivals, museums, and galleries. The full feature premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023.
O’Daniel will be in conversation with artist Charles Gaines.
Clarissa Tossin, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, 2022
Thursday, May 18, 2023
West Coast premiere
The film undertakes a richly sensory journey across moments, languages, and music, roaming through architectural spaces that are variously imagined and real, cosmological and colonized. Commissioned by EMPAC in 2019 and developed through a series of on-site and remote residencies by the artist, the moving image work centers on the capacity of Maya cultural belongings, and wind instruments in particular, to give voice to Indigenous systems of knowledge. The narrative is formed through the personal histories of its Maya protagonists including K’iche’-Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez; Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal, who is filmed inside the Mayan Revival–style Sowden House in Los Angeles; and Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta. The film score and sound design is composed by Michelle Agnes Magalhães.
Tossin will be in conversation with artist/collaborator Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal.
Paul Pfeiffer, Red Green Blue (2022)
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Following the critically acclaimed live performance Amazing Grace / RGB at the Apollo Theater in 2019, Paul Pfeiffer and the University of Georgia Redcoat Band premiered a new audio-visual installation Red Green Blue in New York in 2022. For MOCA’s special program, Pfeiffer will show clips from his new work: the first chapter of a forthcoming three-part installation. Its title refers to the image display system based on the human perception of color. The film considers how multiple channels of sensory information are brought into alignment by presenting the Georgia Bulldogs’ stadium as a broadcast studio. A pioneer of video art and long interested in media imagery and the creation of spectacle in sports and entertainment, Pfeiffer investigates the sports stadium as a site imbued with the potential to fortify national, regional, or community-based models of identity. In Red Green Blue, Pfeiffer edits audio and visual recordings of the marching band, examining the mechanics of the spectacle and disrupting the intuitive flow of perception and cognition.
Conversation details to be announced.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022
Thursday, July 6, 2023
Los Angeles premiere
The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon explores the ways in which material contains memory and holds potential for transformation, reincarnation, and healing. The project is inspired by the people of Quang Tri, on the North Central Coast of Vietnam, one of the most heavily bombed areas in the history of modern warfare. For multiple generations, its residents have lived with the physical residue and lingering trauma of war. Since the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of farmers have died from UXO (unexploded ordnances) and approximately 80 percent of Quang Tri is still contaminated by undetonated mines and explosives. The film centers around a woman named Nguyet and her mother, who run a small junkyard on the outskirts of Quang Tri. For the artist, Nguyet is both a fully-fleshed character and a narrative vehicle for his own physical exploration of material memory.
Nguyen is inspired by the “connections between spaces, people, times, and stories, as well as the possibility of re-imagining the relationship between object and maker, victim and agent.” In his words, “…reconsidering and imagining these connections are stepping stones towards empathy, healing, and imagining new futures.”
Conversation details to be announced.
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Garage Sale, 1976
From MOCA’s Collection
Thursday, July 27, 2023
Garage Sale is a campy X-rated feature film centered on a story of marital upheaval between drag queen Goldie Glitters and her fair-haired husband Hero. A one-time member of San Francisco’s legendary Cockettes theater troupe, Goldie was famously crowned Santa Monica College’s 1975 Homecoming Queen, captured in Bruce Yonemoto’s documentary Homecoming (1975). Garage Sale subverts the drag aspect of Goldie’s performance, enabling her to sympathetically play a woman whose fantasies and expectations have been shaped by Hollywood romance films. The film follows the couple as Hero tries to regain Goldie’s love by seeking the advice of a cast of eccentric characters. Garage Sale is typical of Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s early collaborations that utilize Los Angeles as the backdrop of their experimental cinema, bringing together their interests in the veneer of Hollywood glamor and psychoanalytic narrative.
Bruce Yonemoto will be in conversation with film director Kirby Dick.
Please stay tuned for the MOCA Artist Film Series Fall/Winter 2023 schedule announcement.
Together Thursdays courtesy of Cliff and Mandy Einstein.
MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Brian Dang, Programming Coordinator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.
Image captions (L to R): Martine Syms, The African Desperate (still), 2022. Courtesy of Dominica Inc.; Sky Hopinka, Sunflower Siege Engine (still), 2023, HD video, 16mm to HD video, stereo, color, TRT 12:23. Image courtesy of the artist; Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (still), 2022. © Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2023. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. |
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