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Video Data Bank Newsletter
March 2022
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Conversations at the Edge:
Dani and Sheilah ReStack
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Video Data Bank is thrilled to co-present artists Dani and Sheilah ReStack at Conversations at the Edge with the 32nd Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival as the official opening night screening of the festival.
Theatrical Screening
Thursday, March 31, 6:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center
The videos of Dani and Sheilah ReStack are radical explorations of queer desire, parenthood, and creative community. Formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, the Restacks’ works are exhilarating montages of home, artmaking, sex, parenting, wounds, viscera, animals, gardens, and wild open spaces. The two will present the Chicago premiere of their Feral Domestic trilogy, including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019), and the recently completed Future from Inside (2021), which brings together body doubles, animal synthesis, and expansive notions of family, all refracted through the beauty, cruelty, and promise of life.
The featured trilogy, Feral Domestic, including the works presented above are also now available through the Video Data Bank for pre-order as a compilation.
Conversations at the Edge is a dynamic weekly series of screenings, artist talks, and performances by some of the most compelling media artists of yesterday and today. CATE is organized by the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Video Data Bank.
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VDB Asks...Thirza Cuthand
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We'd love to introduce and welcome artist Thirza Cuthand to the collection through interview as a part of our ongoing series, VDB Asks!
Thirza Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. Her work has also exhibited at galleries including the Mendel in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Read the interview to learn more about her life and practice!
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We're also please to announce the release of a trilogy of works by Thirza Cuthand titled, NDN Survival Trilogy.
NDN Survival Trilogy includes Extractions (2019), Less Lethal Fetishes (2019), and Reclamation (2018), three videos that take on Indigenous resistance to Extraction Colonization, Art Washing and feeling complicit, and recovery of land and healing of colonized lands and peoples.
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VDB at the
60th Ann Arbor Film Festival
(March 22-27, 2022)
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The Video Data Bank is pleased to be participating in and in partnership with the Ann Arbor Film Festival for its 60th edition.
Highlighting two special programs at the festival:
AAFF x Video Data Bank: Medium Meet Medium
March 26th, 2022, 9PM EDT
Michigan Theater
Tickets Available Here
Programmed by our Distribution and Communications Assistant, Emily Martin, the VDB presents in partnership with the festival the collaborative in-person screening program, AAFF x Video Data Bank: Medium Meet Medium. This program, highlighting work from the collection at the Video Data Bank, features titles from seven artists that utilize the technical, aesthetic, and thematic conventions of both video and film in fluid, colorful form. It provides a reflection on the history of the Ann Arbor Film Festival and its relationship to video, noting that it is imperative to reflect on the moments in which mediums meet, converse, and converge.
VDB staff member, Emily Martin, will be in attendance during the week of the festival.
Sadie Benning: Pixelvisions
March 25th, 2022, 7PM EDT
Michigan Theater
Tickets Available Here
Programmed by Scott Northrup with support from the College of Creative Studies and community partner the Neutral Zone, this program surveys Sadie Benning’s early videoworks. They were made more than 30 years ago with a toy camcorder in their Milwaukee bedroom, at a time before they fully understood their nonbinary identity, and have not screened in the Ann Arbor Film Festival until now. These remarkable tapes were recorded with the Fisher Price PXL2000, which shot directly to audio cassettes in a flat, pixelated format known as Pixelvision. This might have been an underwhelming Christmas gift to the then 15-year-old who had been promised a camcorder, but it ultimately gave them agency to make sounds and images that are as tactile as they are emotionally and socially resonant. While Benning has made other complex and indelible works over the years, the time felt right to revisit these powerful, questioning recordings in light of the time that we’ve all spent inside these past few years, coping with who and where we are in this world.
We are also happy to highlight several artists in our collection that will be featured throughout this year’s programs including Ann Oren, Cecelia Condit, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Sky Hopinka.
Tickets for the festival programs and general film schedule information can be found here.
Hope to see you there!
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Mona Hatoum's solo exhibition, Mona Hatoum—Revisit, is now on view at the Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art from February 19th - October 15th, 2022. In the exhibition Mona Hatoum—Revisit, the theme of ‘re-visiting’ occurs both in the exhibition’s actual format, but also in the works themselves, and in Hatoum’s tendency to revisit the same themes and concepts, with a wide variety of processes and materials. Through installation, sculpture, performance, photography, and video, she consistently explores issues of the familiar and the foreign, home and exile, memory and loss. Her multifaceted body of work plays on the tension between these states, as well as on their shifting boundaries.
Newly published by Sternberg Press, Unknown Ideals—Zach Blas, offers an inquiry into Zach Blas’s singular practice through a series of newly commissioned essays by Alexander R. Galloway, Pamela M. Lee, Mahan Moalemi, Kris Paulsen, and Marc Siegel; an interview with Zach Blas by Övül Durmuşoğlu; and writings by the artist himself. These insightful contributions expand on the technological, queer, filmic, and cultural inquiries that comprise the rich world of Blas’s practice, exemplary among his generation of digital artists. The book is available for purchase here.
John Smith's second solo-exhibition, Waldeinsamkeit—Films from the 21st Century, is now open at Kunstmuseum Magdeburg from March 8th-June 6th, 2022. Seventeen years after presenting ‘London and Other Worlds’, his first-ever solo museum exhibition, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg has once again curated a selection of his film and video works in collaboration with the artist, this time focusing on those made over the past two decades.
Filipa César and Sonia Vaz Borges premiered their new short, Mangrove School (Skola di Tarafe), at Cinéma du réel 44th International Documentry Film Festival in the French competition program on March 12th, 2022. The film will also be screening on March 30th and April 1st, 2022 at CPH:Dox. Tickets and more information on these upcoming screenings are available here.
The work of Martha Rosler will be presented by e-flux this Friday to Sunday, March 18th–20th at e-flux Screening Room in a program titled Domination and the Everyday: Videos and Films by Martha Rosler. The weekend program consists of a three-day screening program of moving-image works by Martha Rosler accompanied by discussions featuring Rosler, scholar Nora M. Alter, and artists Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner. Throughout the three days, a projection of Rosler's silent work Museums will eat your lunch (2013, 2 minutes) will be on view at the Screening Room library, where a reading group with Rosler will also take place as a post-script to the program
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