Simple Actions and Aberrant Behaviors

Curated by Pablo de Ocampo

Co-presented with PICA's TBA Festival and the Northwest Film Center

Sep. 15 + 16 - 4:00 pm

Northwest Film Center Whitsel Auditorium
1219 SW Park Ave

Work Stills:

About This Screening

In placing oneself both behind and in front of the lens, an artist creates an inescapable connection between the work and their own lives, regardless of the actual corollaries between that "presence" caught on tape and the lives of the performers making those actions. This collection of recent videos demonstrate a variety of strategies—from simple endurance based actions to more elaborately staged events. Through discomforting and disorienting poses and movements, Patty Chang, Deirdre Logue and Reza Afisina speak to both the fragility and strength of the human psyche. Their actions at once spectacularly mundane and incredibly perverse, from self-flagellation to being embraced (or is it eaten alive?) by a mattress. The other four works in the program represent a more traditional view of the performer as actor, singer and dancer: from Joe Gibbons' monologue to a flower; to Oliver Husain's juxtaposition of an actor reading his diaries with an elaborately choreographed "traditional" folk dance; to the restaging of an old Madonna tune in Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay's piece and a call and response blues ballad by Kalup Linzy.

Program Details

September 15 + 16

Untitled (Eels)
by Patty Chang
2001, video, sound, 16 min.
Beyond the Usual Limits: Part 1
by Deirdre Logue
2005, video, color, sound, 3 min.
What
by Reza Afisina
2003, video, color, sound, 11 min.
A Time to Die
by Joe Gibbons
2006, video, color, sound, 9 min.
Squiggle
by Oliver Husain
2005, video, color, sound, 21 min.
Lollypop
by Kalup Linzy
2006, video, color, sound, 3 min.
Live to Tell
by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
2002, video, color, sound, 6 min.