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Video Data Bank Newsletter
November 2021
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Compilation Release
What Was Always Yours
And Never Lost
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We are thrilled to announce the release of an expansive new compilation of works programmed by Guggenheim Fellow Sky Hopinka titled What Was Always Yours And Never Lost, now available for institutional screenings and educational collections. This program provides an essential introduction to recent works of video art and experimental documentary by indigenous film / video makers throughout North America. What Was Always Yours And Never Lost has changed over the years to include different artists and pieces, the version offered on this compilation comprises titles from artists Thirza Cuthand, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Caroline Monnet, Jackson Polys, and James Luna, linking work across generations with an emphasis on the contemporary practices of indigenous film and video makers. Notably, this program was previously shown as part of the Whitney Biennial in 2019.
The works included in this program critique colonialist histories embedded within institutions of learning, interpersonal relationships, and moving images themselves. Often at the same time, the work speaks to the joys of preserving the past, establishing community, and seeing things differently. The full nature of this program and the process of creating it is thoughtfully conveyed by the following statement from its programmer:
This program began in 2016 with a number of films from a number of filmmakers. Over the years the lineup has changed, and some films have been in it since that beginning. Each iteration offered something new, from these filmmakers that come from different backgrounds, different countries, different homelands, and different nations. Each artist makes works that traverse a wide range of topics dealing directly and indirectly with Indigeneity: assertions of identity and presence in the face of⎯and regardless of⎯colonial history and outdated traditions of anthropology, ethnography, and representation. For me, they fit together so well because of how different they are, and how they state and assert their individuality, their humor, their deliberations, and their love.
- Sky Hopinka
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To celebrate the release of new works from London based filmmaker Paul Tarragó, Video Data Bank sat down with him for our Q&A series VDB Asks. Tarragó's video and celluloid works are described as a mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand.
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AI and I
Cecelia Condit
2021 | 00:07:17 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | 4k video
Within a backdrop of the natural world, a woman explores a personal relationship with the home artificial intelligence (AI) device, Alexa. AI and I asks questions as to the nature of what it is to be alive and human, confronting our complex co-dependence with technology.
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Another Hayride
Matt Wolf
2021 | 00:17:51 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video
As the AIDS epidemic took hold in the early 1980s, self-help guru Louise Hay created a space for healing called the Hayride. Drawing hundreds of gay men confronting a deadly and stigmatized disease, Louise promised that they could overcome AIDS through self-love. Some said this early new age wellness movement was unscientific and harmful. Others who were suffering said that Louise healed them. In the face of a deadly pandemic and government neglect, resilience takes unusual forms, and for Louise Hay’s circle, intimate forms of reckoning were transformative.
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Chicago Filmmakers' Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival will be taking place from March 31st until April 3rd, 2022. Regular deadline for submissions is December 16th, 2021.
Submissions are open here.
Cecelia Condit's We Were Hardly More Than Children will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in their newest and noteworthy exhibition, Who Will Write The History of Tears: Artists on Women's Rights, opening on November 26th, 2021. This exhibition is about the relations between the female body and repressive laws. The works presented in the exhibition strive to break through the impasse that has prevailed in the debate over abortion, to transcend the crisis of verbal and visual language.
Congratulations to Cecelia Condit for her work, I've Been Afraid, receiving an honorable mention award at this year's Chicago Underground Film Festival!
Glenn Belverio's tape One Man Ladies featuring Vaginal Davis will be on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in the exhibition, Subscribe: Artists and Alternative Magazines, 1970-1995, from December 11th, 2021 to May 2nd, 2022. This exhibition brings together over 130 magazines as well as photographs and time-based media works that evidence how these publications, by prizing formal experimentation and generating new affiliations across identities, challenged mainstream definitions of culture and belonging.
Foxy Production gallery is presenting, Sparrow Dust, the inaugural solo exhibition of Steve Reinke at the gallery from November 6th through December 23rd. The artist presents his new video, Father, Limping Through a Field of Clover (2021), a collection of text-based works on paper, a series of needlepoints, and his video from 2004, Anthology of American Folk Song.
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