12: 31 mins, HD video, stereo, color, 2016

Sky Hopinka deconstructs language through cinematic works “to be free from the dogma of traditional storytelling”¹. This video, an ode to poet Diane Burns (1957–2006), weaves sonically and visually in and out of references to Native culture and reflects on mortality, transcendence, and the intertwinement of individuality, myth, and politics. Hopinka describes I'll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You'll Become as “a place for new mythologies to syncopate with de-territorialized movement and song.”² He creates this space formally through the near dissolution of image sequences, challenging the semiotics of documentary filmmaking by replacing traditional narrative imagery with visuals informed by color field painting. This layered abstraction is pushed further by the use of music as a nonverbal language.

1 Sky Hopinka, “Language as Film: A Dialogue with Sky Hopinka,” in Reclaiming Artistic Research, ed. Lucy Cotter (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2019).
2 http://www.skyhopinka.com/ill-remember-you-as-you-were↩

Documentation, visiting artist lecture, 1: 32 mins, 2018

Gordon Hall describes their sculptural works as “extremely precise objects of ambiguous use,” evoking their ability to convey both utilitarian objecthood and the possibility of more poetic and sensual human interactions.¹ In this lecture, they present their work through the lens of a series of material and conceptual rubrics, including “platforms,” “shadows,” and “surfaces,” as well as “object lessons” and “what a body can do.” Formally, Hall’s sculpture echoes minimalism yet directs its phenomenological interests toward the expanded corporeal imaginaries of the nontraditionally gendered body. It is often accompanied by abstract gestural performances, sometimes by Hall, who is a trained dancer. Encompassing their sculpture, performance, and writing, the lecture unfolds how Hall “cares” for objects in ways that offer us a renewed experience of the body “so that in the moments we encounter one another, we are actually able to see differently than the way we have been taught.”² The lecture took place as part of the IMFA Visiting Artist series at the Intermedia graduate program at the University Maine in 2015.

1 Gordon Hall, “Extremely Precise Objects of Ambiguous Use,” in Over-beliefs: Gordon Hall Collected Writing, 2011–2018, ed. Spencer Byrne-Seres (Portland, OR: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 2019), 15.
2 Gordon Hall, “Reading Things: On Sculpture, Gender and Relearning How to See,” in Over-beliefs, 10.↩

Video link no longer available

Performance documentation, 1:21 mins, 2019

Playwright, theater director, writer, and musician Manuela Infante came to prominence in the Chilean theater scene for plays that foregrounded the fictional invention necessary to writing history. Infante has described her own practice as “a lab for embodied philosophy,”¹ and Estado Vegetal is the first performance in which she engages object-oriented ontology and the nonhuman turn in philosophy, with the aim of creating a post-human theater. This one-woman play, whose narrative structure recalls the branching of a plant, explores how plant intelligence could change human perspectives. Infante incorporates the findings of Stefano Mancuso—one of the pioneers of the new field of plant neurobiology—and plant philosopher Michael Marder, who notes that “to recognize a valid ‘other’ in plants is also beginning to recognize that vegetal other within us.”² Using writing strategies, light, and sound to open up the “non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants”³, Estado Vegetal also makes a political proposition by rooting plants’ distributed model of organization and governance deeply in its own structure.

1 “Performance as Philosophy: A Dialogue with Manuela Infante,” in Reclaiming Artistic Research, ed. Lucy Cotter (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2019).
2 Cited by Manuela Infante during a lecture entitled “Post-human Theatre,” held at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, April 27, 2019.
3 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 10.↩

Documented lecture, 28: 48 mins, 2015

In this performative lecture, delivered over Skype for the 2015 symposium “Thinking Through Institutions,” writer and curator Sarah Rifky proposes that the best way to address institutions is as plots with characters. She poses a list of questions (“Is art an institution? Is language an institution? Is the law an institution?”), through which she moves toward the pivotal question of whether institutions are fictional or real. In doing so, she reveals the fluidity of apparently fixed structures, exposing their malleability and intertwinement with language. Drawing on strategies from speculative fiction—evident also in some of Rifky’s writings—the lecture takes on an artistic form without becoming a lecture performance per se. “Thinking Through Institutions” was curated by Megs Morley for Para Institution, Galway, Ireland.

HD video, 4 mins, 2016.

Katarina Zdjelar’s artistic practice often engages with the embodiment of linguistic processes, palimpsests of a broken continuum of cultural and social codes, ideologies, pedagogies, and political persuasions. AAA (Mein Herz) is a single-shot video work showing a young woman simultaneously performing four compositions. Each time her song is interrupted, it continues seamlessly in another place, moving through diverse temporalities and moods. As the singer’s face becomes a battleground on which the competing tempos, rhythm, languages, and styles play out, the corporeality of her voice is foregrounded. Best viewed in an exhibition context, this video work reaches the viewer’s body at every sensory level, demanding a response in its own embodied language.

Portrait video by Camden Arts Centre, 4:47 mins, 2018

Artist Christian Nyampeta works across art, design, and theory “in search of a new narrative of how to live together.”¹ In this brief video, he reflects on his solo exhibition “Words after the World,” which was presented at the Camden Arts Centre, London (September 29, 2017–January 14, 2018), following an extended period of working on-site. During this time, the artist initiated a “scriptorium,” a working group tasked with translating historical Francophone texts by African philosophers. This collective structure informed the script for Words after the World, a short film about a writer attempting to draft a novel at a time when the use of existing words is restricted by copyright. As becomes evident in this interview, Nyampeta often works through collaborative and cooperative processes, with the afterlife of these dialogues taking several forms, including artworks, translations, publications, social structures, and radio programs, among others. The film was produced by Jared Schiller for Camden Arts Centre on the occasion of Nyampeta’s exhibition.

Note 1 Christian Nyampeta, “A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness Without Sorrow,” Contour 9, Mechelen, 2019.↩