Los Angeles Filmforum and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions present
Unraveling Collective Forms: Films by Arshia Haq, Jeannette Ehlers, Sky Hopinka, and Cecilia Vicuña
Sunday, April 28, 2019, 7:30 pm
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028
Filmmaker Jeannette Ehlers, and exhibition curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar in person!
In conjunction with the exhibition Unraveling Collective Forms at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Filmforum co-presents digital films by artists Cecilia Vicuña, Jeannette Ehlers, Arshia Haq and Sky Hopinka whose works are on display in the show.
The artists approach processes of cultural erasure through visual strategies that document fainting, magnifying the details to revive a death ocean, myths, languages and people’s histories. The diverse strategies that Vicuña, Ehlers, Haq and Hopinka weave on the films are spiritual and rebellious, outside and against Western Aesthetics.
Pre-screening reception at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., from 5:30pm to 6:30pm, just two blocks away from the Egyptian Theater.
The exhibition Unraveling Collective Forms runs from April 3 – May 26, 2019, curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar. For more, see https://welcometolace.org/event/unravelling-collective-forms/
Tickets: $10 general; $6 students (with ID)/seniors; free for Filmforum and LACE Members. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at https://unraveling.bpt.me or at the door.
For more information: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238.
Jeannette Ehlers is a video, photo and performance artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Experimental imagery characterizes her multi disciplinary work and for years she has created artwork that engages with resistance towards coloniality. On these changeable terms, meaning and identity are explored in both a sophisticated and immediate way. Jeannette Ehlers’s performative and cinematic universes delve into ethnicity and identity inspired by her own Danish and Caribbean background. Her pieces revolve around big questions and difficult issues, such as Denmark’s role as a slave nation—a part of the Danish cultural heritage, which often gets overlooked in the general historiography. http://www.jeannetteehlers.dk/
Daniela Lieja Quinatar (Mexico City, 1984) is a curator at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and works between Los Angeles and Mexico, emphasizing contemporary art and curatorial practices that explore the politics and social issues of everyday life. She is part of the curatorial team of MexiCali Biennial 2018-19, and was recently awarded the Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship.
Screening:
(Re)collections, by Arshia Haq
USA, 2005. color, sound, 19:23 min
A film about the intersections of personal and historical memory, collecting and archives, and the death of a language. https://arshiahaq.com
Black Magic at the White House, by Jeannette Ehlers
Denmark, 2009, color, sound, 3:36 min
Music: Fanamfe af / by Francis Ko Aziat; Camera: Nikolaj Recke; Special effects: Dj Design
BLACK MAGIC AT THE WHITE HOUSE revolves around Marienborg, a country seat at Sorgenfri north of Copenhagen, today serving as the official residence of the Danish Prime Minister. Marienborg was originally built in the 18th century as a summer residence by Olfert Fas Fischer, naval officer and director of the large trading company Asiatisk Kompagni.
BLACK MAGIC AT THE WHITE HOUSE ties Marienborg’s present function as the place from which the Prime Minister’s New Year’s speech is transmitted and international heads of state are received to its less known past. Over the years, some of its owners possessed fortunes than can partly be attributed to the running of plantations in the Danish West Indies, and enslaved Africans are believed to have lived at Marienborg for a while.
In the video, Jeannette Ehlers dances like a ghost through the grand halls of Marienborg. She wiggles, kisses the floor and performs a so-called vévé – a vodou ritual in which the priest draws certain patterns on the ground in the hope of invoking the gods of health, reconciliation, and protection against evil spirits.
Fainting Spells, by Sky Hopinka
USA, 2018, color, sound, 10:45 min.
Los Angeles premiere!
Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant – used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted. http://www.skyhopinka.com
Kon Kon, by Cecilia Vicuña
Chile, 2010, SD video, color, sound, 54 min.
Los Angeles premiere!
In this documentary poem, Cecilia Vicuña returns to Con Con, the birthplace of her art in Chile, where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being destroyed.
Con Con is located at the mouth of the Aconcagua River whose source is the glacier of Aconcagua, the tallest mountain the Western Hemisphere. Named for the oldest deity of the Andes, the god Kon, it may have been a sacred oracle site for millennia, associated with the most renowned oracle site in the Americas: Pachacamac, located on the coast of Peru.
The word Con (Kon) alludes to the sanctity of the cycle of water – from glacier to ocean to cloud – a circularity intensified by the repetition: Con Con. In the sacred Valle del Aconcagua, the “bailes chinos” created a powerful mystical sound: the “sonido rajado” (torn sound), a multiphonic music of the pre-Columbian Andres. Based on dissonance, the “bailes chinos” are ritual dances dedicated to increasing the life-force. Continuously performed throughout colonial times, the dance is now dying along with the sea.
Exploring the forgotten meaning of the ancient names, the artist recovers an erased cultural memory. In this hybrid work, part poem, part documentary, Cecilia Vicuña creates new bridges between the ancestral and the avant-garde.” http://www.konkon.cl/
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Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
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