Cosmos Cinema conversation: Heidi Lau

Ben Eastham talks to artist Lucile Desamory. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Lucile Desamory works at the frontiers of perception and cognition, with a special interest in what the Berlin-based artist refers to as the “too-much, the falsified, and spurned narratives.” The breadth of her pursuit is reflected in the diversity of her approach, which uses film, painting, embroidery, photography, and her voice. Often working in collaboration, her oeuvre extends to theatrical works, feature-length films, and a television show currently in production.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Heidi Lau. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham.  Heidi Lau’s luminous ceramics evoke architectural ruins, funerary vessels, and mythological creatures. Channeling the artist’s personal history, the syncretic cultures of her native Macau, and the diasporic experience, Lau transforms Taoist ritual tokens of mourning and remembrance into what Kang Kang describes as “oblique monuments for an impossible ancestry.”   Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Ciarán Finlayson about his book, Perpetual Slavery, published by Floating Opera Press in 2023.   In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. Finlayson suggests that these two artists’ work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.    Ciarán Finlayson is an editor from Houston, Texas. He is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy. Finlayson is on the core faculty of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, and has taught aesthetics and social theory at Columbia University, New York, and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and at socialist night schools hosted by the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

A conversation preceding the African Film Institute’s inaugural screening at e-flux curated by Natacha Nsabimana, featuring two works by Rwandan filmmaker Amelia Umuhire. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room. Amelia Umuhire (b. 1991, Kigali, Rwanda) is a filmmaker and artist living in Kigali and Berlin. In 2015, she wrote and directed the award-winning web-series Polyglot, in which she follows the lives of young, deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists. Her short film Mugabo was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and screened at MOCA Los Angeles and the Berlin Biennale among many other places. In 2018, Umuhire produced the Prix Europa-nominated radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She was a Villa Romana Fellow in 2020, and is currently working on her first feature film. Natacha Nsabimana teaches in the anthropology department at the university of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial critique, musical movements, and the cultural and political worlds of African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora. The African Film Institute aims to create a home and a place of intimacy with African cinema in New York, through developing gradually and organically a viewing program animated by fellowships; a growing library; an active writers’ room; and an expanding catalog of recorded dialogs. The African Film Institute draws from the visual cultures that view cinema as an evening school: a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination—employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods informed by different uses of time, visual and textual histories, and social struggles and hopes in mutuality between their own locality and the world at large. 

Tamara Khasanova and Hallie Ayres talk to artist Saodat Ismailova following To Share a Dream With a River, a screening of three films at e-flux. Stay tuned after the conversation for an excerpt from a soundscape composed by Camille Norment for Ismailova’s film, The Haunted. Films discussed in this episode: The Haunted (2017, 23 minutes) takes the form of an open letter to the Turan tiger. A majestic symbol of the Central Asian landscape, this animal has been extinct for several decades but lives on as a sacred symbol in the collective imagination of the local population. In her captivating film essay, Ismailova pays homage to the tiger as she shows how firmly bound it is to the region’s history. Stains of Oxus (2016, 24 minutes) follows a transformation of the landscape of the Amu Darya riverbanks and the people that inhabit them, beginning from the high plateau in Tajikistan to the lowland deserts in Uzbekistan, where the river finds its end. Chillpiq (2018, 17 minutes) begins with a scene of two buses emerging on the horizon as they drive toward Chillpiq. A group of forty girls climb the ruins that stand atop a mount in the middle of the steppe. One by one, they tie pieces of cloth to a flagpole that crowns the archeological site, and worship it as a symbol of life. The girls circle the shrine while the setting sun changes the light to an orange glow, blurring their silhouettes as they disappear into the site. Two Horizons (2022, 24 mins) was exhibited as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s Partial Eclipse section, and hints at infinite strategies through which humans access occluded forms of matter and energy. Two Horizons combines a prophecy carried down in the ancient Turkic oral histories of Qorqut with the more recent history of a space launch facility. The tomb of Qorqut—the storyteller and seer who is the central hero of the epic—lies in the south of Kazakhstan, near the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In the local culture the belief persists that a person will one day come to defeat gravity and achieve eternal life.    Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist who came of age in the post-Soviet era in Central Asia. She graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute in Uzbekistan and Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts in France. Drawing on the cultural identities and vernacular histories of Central Asia, Saodat Ismailova’s films meditate on memory, spirituality, immortality, and extinction. Frequently based around folk stories in which women are the lead protagonists, and exploring systems of knowledge suppressed by globalized modernity, these consciousness expanding works hover between visible and invisible worlds.  Tamara Khasanova is a curator, researcher, and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She currently serves as an Archives Assistant at e-flux, and curated the To Share a Dream With a River screening program. Hallie Ayres was on the curatorial team for Cosmos Cinema, the 14th Shanghai Biennale. She is Associate Director of e-flux.

Recorded live at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 during a retrospective screening of selected works by Laure Prouvost. The pre-screening introduction by Amal Issa and Laure Prouvost is followed by a conversation between the artist and writer-curator Kathy Noble. The screening portion of the program featured a selection of works spanning the last decade: OWT (2007, 3 minutes), Finger Point Green (2010, 3 minutes), They Parlaient Idéale (29 minutes, 2019), Every Sunday, Grandma (2022, 7 minutes), OMA JE (You, My, Omma, Mama, Shadow Does, and A Walking Story) (2023, 22 minutes). Language—in its broadest sense—permeates the video, sound, installation, and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that weave in film in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images, and meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex works that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. At once seductive and jarring, her approach to filmmaking employs layered storytelling, quick edits, montage, and wordplay, and is composed of a rich, tactile assortment of images, sounds, and spoken and written phrases.    Laure Prouvost (b. 1867, Lieumeconu, France) lives and works. Here a long list of museums and institutions. A line, interesting things, a coma, a line, a list of residencies and prizes. A selection of solo projects including: an Oma-je in Vienna, a flying Grandma in Oslo, Esmé Blue in Busan, Helsinki, and Madrid, an elastic arm hold in tight in Copenhagen, a Swallowing and Breathing in Eindhoven, a Smoking Mother in Copenhagen, a Melting Into Another in Lisbon and Sonsbeek, an Occupied Paradise in Aalst, Deep See Blue Surrounding You in Venice, Toulouse, and Lille, a Waiting Room with objects in Minneapolis, a New Museum for Granddad in Milano, a tearoom for Grandma in Derry, a karaoke room in Brussels, a new octopus ink vodka bar for Gregor in Rotterdam, A travel agency for an Uncle in Frankfurt, a lobby for love among the artists in the Hague and Luzern… tea bags, and wet floors and tentacules. Kathy Noble is a curator and writer based in New York, currently working as Senior Curator at Performa. There she previously served as Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial Affairs to oversee the program and curated numerous commissions. As Curator, Interdisciplinary, at Tate Modern she co-curated Tate Modern Live, The Long Weekend Festival, and Art in Action, the first program in The Tanks spaces. In 2016 she launched the inaugural Art Night festival with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, presenting ten site-specific projects at venues across Westminster. She has published numerous essays in books and magazines such as Artforum, frieze, and Mousse Magazine.

Recorded in February 2023, Keli Maksud talks to Esteban Jefferson about his exhibition, MAY 25th, 2020, at 303 Gallery. A second iteration of the show will open at Goldsmiths CCA in October 2023. Esteban Jefferson's practice centers around issues of race, identity and the legacies of colonialism. Using photography, drawing, painting, and sound installation as forms of documentation, Jefferson paints the focal points of his compositions in great detail, creating a stark contrast between the subject or object in focus and the surrounding environment. The paintings are left intentionally unfinished, creating a raw style emblematic of his investigative process.  Well known for his series, “Petit Palais”, first featured at White Columns, New York, in 2019, Jefferson’s latest works consider the related symbolism of flags and toppling of equestrian monuments in New York, through the lens of racial and colonial legacies. Esteban Jefferson was born in New York City in 1989, and attended Columbia University. Recent group exhibitions include Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York (2020); ESTAMOS BIEN: La Trienal, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2021) and Open Call, The Shed, New York (2021). Jefferson lives and works in New York City.  

An excerpt from Raven Chacon’s performance Solos, followed by a conversation with Xenia Benivolski, recorded live at e-flux on April 27.  Solos, is a series of short, improvised works performed in quick succession. Using a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, Chacon’s experimental compositions range from sparse, minimalistic soundscapes to complex, multi-layered works that incorporate voices, noises, and found sounds. Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Since 2004, he has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Ar, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, SITE Santa Fe, Ende Tymes Festival, New York, the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Chacon is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage’s Fellowship-in-Residence. Xenia Benivolski writes and lectures about visual art, sound, and music. She is the curator of the project You Can’t Trust Music which is an online e-flux exhibition.  

Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Jacopo Galimberti about his book, Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988), published in 2022. Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and Assistant Professor at IUAV (Venice). He is the author of Individuals Against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956-1969) (Liverpool) and Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso), which historicizes those political currents and movements alongside visual and literary culture that was either in dialogue or in debate with the figures he centers—as well as the revolutionary aesthetic/cultural theory that they produced through workers’ inquiries and research on forms of postwar labor, and later participation in extraparliamentary militant social and urban movements. In addition to providing an art and architecture historical perspective on these movements, the book acts as a very helpful entry-point to operaist theory, which Classe Operaia called an “anti-dialectical Marxism,” including the work of Mario Tronti, Rita di Leo, Mandredo Tarfuri, Silvia Federici, and the various groups and grassroots movements that would constitute autonomia. Referenced in this episode: Rossella Biscotti, The Trial at e-flux (2012)

Ben Eastham talks to Shubigi Rao about her long term project Pulp, and curating the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.  Artist and writer Shubigi Rao makes layered installations of books, etchings, drawings, pseudo-scientific machines, metaphysical puzzles, video, ideological board games, garbage and archives, and has been exhibited and collected in Singapore and internationally. Her interests include archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history. Since 2014 she has been visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally for Pulp, a decade-long film, book and visual art project about the history of book destruction. See here for more info. Rao curated the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022–23. The biennale was originally planned for 2020–21, but was delayed due to COVID-19.