Fringe Philadelphia events

PIFVA has updated their calendar and are listing the remaining media-oriented events in the Philly Fringe festival.

Screening and Q&A with director John Greyson

"FIG TREES"

Screening and Q&A with director John Greyson
Wed., March 14

7:00 PM

KINSC Sharpless Auditorium
Haverford College

Fig Trees is documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Capetown, as narrated by an albino squirrel, an amputee busker and St. Teresa of Avila. Organized at Haverford College by Farid Azfar (History Department) and Vicky Funari (Filmmaker, Independent College Programs).

The recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art, John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world. In addition to Fig Trees, his feature films include Urinal, Lilies, Uncut, and The Law of Enclosures). As a televisor director, his credits include episodes for Queer as Folk, Made In Canada, Drop the Beat and Welcome to Paradox. Greyson is active in various anti-censorship, AIDS, peace and queer activist media projects. He has taught film and video theory and production in Canada, the United States, Cuba and South Africa. He joined the full-time faculty in the Film Department of York University (Ontario, Canada) in 2005.

Peter Rose film screening

Language, Time, and Fiction - Six works by Peter Rose

Peter Rose will show six works that propose sly philosophical questions about consciousness and language, time and space, and appearance and reality. The screening will conclude with the Philadelphia premiere of a new work that presents a luminous nocturnal portrait of a vanished culture.

University of Pennsylvania
Van Pelt Film Studies Center
Room 425 Van Pelt Library

Thursday, April 14, 2011
5:00pm

Works on video format.

Director Alison Kobayashi in person

At the International House tomorrow, Feb. 24, 7:00pm, performance and video artist Alison Kobayashi will be presenting her work.

Kobayashi’s pieces address the migration of desires, alongside the transmission of ideas and memory across distances and time. In other words, the works function as mediation through migration. Kobayashi is captivated by found objects that contain traces of private experiences.

Films with artist's notes below.

Dan Carter
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2006, Canada, video, 15 mins, color
Dan Carter donated his answering machine to a secondhand store. Dan Carter did not remove the cassette tape. So I took it. This film is based on the messages.

From: Alex To: Alex
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 200,6 Canada , video, 6 mins, color
In the fall of 2003 I found a letter on the Winston Churchill Blvd QEW overpass. It was labeled From: Alex To: Alex. This is a film based on the contents of that letter.

DO GOOD
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2009, Canada, video, 11 mins, color
I catalogued my family’s home video collection. I came across videos of my sister and I in Brownie and Girl Guide ceremonies. It made me want to DO GOOD. It made me want to invite others to DO GOOD too. Five Brownies created new badges. Each Brownie made a video that ex¬plained what was required to earn her badge. You are invited to participate in DO GOOD.

PERIOD 4L
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2011, Canada , video, work in process, color
John Massier found a letter at a bus stop outside of Dickie’s Dounuts in Buffalo, New York. He gave me the letter.

Pleasure Dome
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2010, Canada, video, 12 mins, color
Very little is publicly known about what is inside Pleasure Dome. We sought to learn more about Pleasure Dome by closely examining its characters. The goal was to create an objective look at a very singular place. This video is a sample of those findings.

Stan Douglas in conversation

Stan Douglas in conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen and Nora Alter


Monday, February 14, 2011
6:30 pm
Slought Foundation (4017 Walnut)
Free; reservation not required

Slought Foundation and the Temple University Department of Film and Media Arts are pleased to present artist Stan Douglas in conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen and Nora Alter on Monday, February 14, 2011 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation. This program has been organized by Nora Alter, Chair of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. The conversation will engage Douglas’ Vidéo (2007), an audio-visual meditation on Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965), as well as the artist’s more recent public art project Abbott and Cordova (2009), a photo reenactment of the Gastown riot of 1971. The event will begin with a special screening of Vidéo (35 min; 2007).

"I'm always looking for this nexus point, the middle ground of some kind of transformation. I guess this accounts for the embarrassingly consistent binary constructions in my work. Almost all of the works, especially the ones that look at specific historical events, address moments when history could have gone one way or another. We live in the residue of such moments and for better or worse their potential is not yet spent."
-- Stan Douglas in conversation with Diana Thater (London: Phaidon Press, 1998).

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 and attended the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. His film and video installations, photography, and work in television address the history of literature, cinema and music, the technical and social aspects of mass media, and modernism in terms of its failures as a theoretical utopian concept and its manifestation in present day urbanism. His work frequently engages in subtle societal criticisms and investigations of authorship and subjectivity, and has often been imbued with tropes associated with Blues and Jazz. They are media machines, Automats of a sort, which involve the viewer in their mechanics; they reflect an era of transition from literally mechanical reproduction to electronic saturation. Douglas's widely appreciated work has appeared in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and three Venice Biennales; at Documenta 9, 10 and 11; at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao; and at the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco and New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Dia Foundation for the Arts in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others. His work has also been shown in New York at The Studio Museum, Harlem, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Dia Center for the Arts.

Diedrich Diederichsen was editor of two music magazines in the 1980s (Sounds, Hamburg; Spex, Cologne) and taught at several academies in the 1990s in Germany, Austria, and the U.S. in the fields of art history, musicology, theater studies, and cultural studies. He was Professor for Cultural Theory at Merz Academy, Stuttgart from 1998 to 2006, and is currently Professor of Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. Recent Publications include Psicodela y ready-made, Buenos Aires 2010; Utopia of Sound, Vienna 2010 (co-edited with Constanze Ruhm); Rock, Paper, Scissor—Pop-Music/Fine Arts, Graz 2009 (co-edited with Peter Pakesch); On Surplus Value (of Art), Rotterdam/New York 2008; Eigenblutdoping, Cologne 2008; Kritik des Auges, Hamburg 2008; Argument Son, Dijon 2007; Personas en loop, Buenos Aires 2006; Musikzimmer, Cologne 2005.

Video Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Will Schmenner, a Penn grad student who is bringing his film programming experience to our benefit, is curating a series of artists' films and videos at The Museum of Art. The first screening in the series is this Sunday, February 13:

Kiss (Robert Bowers, 1971, 6 minutes)

True/False (Colin Campbell, 1972, 9 minutes)
This Is My Mouth (John Watt, 1973, 10 minutes)

Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects (Lisa Steele, 1974, 13 minutes)

Semiotics of the Kitchen (Martha Rosler, 1975, 6 minutes)

My Rectum Is Not a Grave (To a Film Industry in Crisis) (Steve Reinke, 2007, 7 minutes)

Screening starts at 2:00pm.
Film at Perelman

Location: Perelman Media Room

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Perelman building

Single ticket: $8 (members and students with ID $6), includes Perelman building admission
Series ticket: $38 (members and students with ID $30), includes Perelman building admission

Series details here.