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Advance tickets are recommended and are available for visits through July.

A mythic character who both was ahead of her time and helped to define it, heiress Peggy Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement, collecting art and developing personal relationships with Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp, among countless other leading figures. Fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the world’s most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo. Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. USA, 2015, 97 minutes.

The story of the most radical video collective of the 1960’s and 70’s, this documentary tells the quirky tale of ten people’s optimism, creativity, and vision of what television could have become had the three big networks not ruled the TV airwaves. Produced and directed by Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin, who will be in attendance, along with Skip Blumberg, legendary video artist and former member of Videofreex. USA, 2015, 79 minutes.

 


Videofreex is presented in partnership with the UMB Film Series.
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Drawing upon work from native and diaspora filmmakers and artists from West and Southeast Asia, Monsoon, Prayers New Routes is a compilation of films and videos that document the Islamic communities dispersed around the Indian Ocean and beyond. Many of the featured filmmakers and artists reside in trans-oceanic port-cities, and their practice touches upon concepts that reverberate across diaspora and migration, urban culture and religious struggle, and new approaches to image and sound in the age of globalization.

Filmmakers Monira Al Qadiri and Aryo Danusiri will be present for a post-screening discussion.

Film list:
  • Jabal Hadroh, Jabal Al Jannah (Green Mountain, Heaven Mountain)
    Director: Otty Widasari, 2013, 10 min.
  • The Flaneurs
    Director: Aryo Danusiri, 2013, 4 min.
  • On Broadway
    Director: Aryo Dausiri, 2009/2014, 44 min.
  • Ashura
    Director: Köken Ergun, 2013, 24 min.
  • Travel Prayers 
    Director: Monira Al Qadiri,  2014, 3 min.
  • Behind the Sun 
    Director: Monira Al Qadiri,  2013, 10 min.
  • Prism
    Director: Monira Al Qadiri, 2007-ongoing, 6 min.

Total running time: 101 minutes

Programmed by Xin Zhou in collaboration with Harvard University Asia Center

An example of slow cinema, Distant is made up of thirteen parts, each a single long take without any dialogue and relying solely on image, sound, and action. Dramatic, realistic, and mysterious, these fragments tell a story of distance, focusing on the subtle moments when people are suddenly confronted with modernity and gradually become lost in transition. The film attempts to describe the alienation, abandonment, and eternal loneliness of today’s human condition. Presented by Crows & Sparrows. Director Zhengfan Yang will attend in person for a discussion with Yangqiao Lu, who writes about cinema for ArtForum China, La Furia Umana, Brooklyn Rail and LEAP magazine. China, 2013, 88 minutes.

Embedded in each seemingly mundane sequence shot is the implication of critique, a witty observation about modern life, or perhaps just a pleasurable uncertainty about the film’s fictive and documentary content.

The Brooklyn Rail

One of America’s foremost postwar artists, Eva Hesse helped establish the post-minimalist movement with pioneering sculptures made with latex, fiberglass, and plastics. This first feature-length tribute to her life and work makes superb use of the artist’s voluminous journals, her correspondence with close friend and mentor Sol LeWitt, and interviews with such fellow artists as Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, Nancy Holt, and Dan Graham, who recall her passion, ambition, and tenacity. The documentary captures these qualities, while also exploring the struggles of an artist who, in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s, was one of the few women to make work taken seriously in a field dominated by male pop artists and minimalists. Directed by Marcie Begleiter. USA/Germany, 2016, 108 minutes.

Filmmakers Marcie Begleiter and Karen Shapiro will be in attendance and will speak following the film with Kirsten Swenson, Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Black Radical Imagination is a touring program of shorts that delve into the worlds of new media, video art, and experimental narrative. Each artist contributes their own vision of postmodern society through the state of current black culture. The screening will be followed by a discussion with curators and featured filmmaker Terence Nance to contemplate the work and its impact on our ever-changing global culture. Nance will lead a workshop for teens in the Fast Forward program in conjunction with this event.

Curated by Amir George, a motion picture artist and film curator from Chicago, and Erin Christovale, a curator based in Los Angeles focusing on film/video within the African Diaspora, in collaboration with Sweety’s, a curatorial platform dedicated to supporting and promoting artists of color locally and internationally.


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NOTE: This program will take place at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard.

In conjunction with exhibition The Artist’s Museum at the ICA, exhibition artists Anna Craycroft and Pierre Leguillon will appear in a two-part program at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at 24 Quincy Street in Cambridge.  

4–6 PM: TALK
Anna Craycroft and Ann Reynolds in conversation: “Creative Research” Should be an Oxymoron

Introduction by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA

6–8 PM: SCREENING + PERFORMANCE
Pierre Leguillon: The Promise of the Screen
(Seating first come, first served)

Artist Anna Craycroft and art historian Ann Reynolds will be in conversation about Craycroft’s project for The Artist’s Museum at the ICA, The Earth Is a Magnet, which traces relationships between photographer Berenice Abbott and nine contemporary artists, and about Reynolds’s forthcoming book, In Our Time, which addresses the cinematic and social circumstances of various intergenerational creative communities in New York from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Following will be Pierre Leguillon’s performative work The Promise of the Screen (2007–), which doubles as a film screening and a speakeasy, dedicated to the peripheral aspects of cinema. For the CCVA, Leguillon will present The Photography Manual, an anthology of film sequences “to teach, to frame, to trigger, to illuminate, to develop but also, perhaps, to commit suicide with the camera.” The film montage is based on technical and popular books preserved at the Société française de Photographie in Paris, detailing the multiple uses of the medium, from fashion photography to judicial photography, amateur photography, or photojournalism.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Mining fields like education, cinema, psychology, literature, and art history, Anna Craycroft examines cultural models for fostering individuality. Through drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures, furniture, installations, books, workshops, or curatorial projects she works thematically on a single thesis over a series of exhibitions. Craycroft has had solo shows at the Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon; the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas; Tracy Williams Ltd in New York; Le Case del Arte in Milan, Italy; and a two-person exhibition at REDCAT Gallery in Los Angeles, Sandroni Rey in Los Angeles, and the Fundacio Miro in Barcelona. In November 2016, she debuted a major new commission, The Earth Is a Magnet, as part of The Artist’s Museum.

Ann Reynolds is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In her research and teaching, she focuses on 20th and 21st-century art and visual culture in the United States and Europe. Her recent publications include essays on Joan Jonas for the 2015 Venice Biennale; the experience of remoteness in relation to land art (Centre Georges Pompidou Spring 2015); Bob Fleischner, Jack Smith, and Ken Jacobs’ film Blonde Cobra (Criticism Spring 2014); and Charles Simonds’ Urban Dwellings (Dumbarton Oaks, 2011). She is the author of Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere (MIT Press, 2003). She is currently working on a new book entitled In Our Time, as well as co-curating an exhibition focused on the magazine View (1940–47).  

Pierre Leguillon, born in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, in 1969, lives and works in Brussels. His works, performances, and projections have been the subject of many monographic presentations, notably at Raven Row (London, 2011), Mamco (Geneva, Switzerland, 2010), Moderna Museet (Malmö, Sweden, 2010), the Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2009), and Artists Space (New York, 2009). The artist, whose work La grande evasion (The great escape), 2015, is included in The Artist’s Museum, presented two installations at the 2013 Carnegie International, held in Pittsburgh in 2013: A Vivarium for George E. Ohr and Dubuffet Typographer, the latter accompanied by a book published by (SIC) in Brussels. A laureate of the Villa Médicis in 2003, Leguillon teaches at HEAD (Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design) in Geneva.


Film by Pierre Leguillon; Production: Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Photo Expert: Aurélien Mole; Camera: Julien Crépieux; Editing: Adrien Faucheux; Production assistant: Olivier Strauss. Thanks to Clément Chéroux, Paul-Louis Roubert, and Sam Stourdzé.

Join us for the 29th annual Boston Jewish Film Festival, presenting premieres of documentary and narrative films from around the world. Watch films with Jewish themes and hear stories of Jewish life from around the globe and throughout history. Films are followed by in-depth conversations with filmmakers and other special guests.

Subte-Polska | 5:30 PM
99 minutes

Other Screenings:
  • Women on the Verge: Short Film Program | 2:30 PMhttp://my.icaboston.org/single/PSDetail.aspx?psn=288
    approx 100 minutes

    116 Cameras
    Hinda and Her Sisterrrz
    A Portrait of a Beautiful Woman
    Wig Shop
    And, the winner of the BJFF Short Film Competition 

  • A Quiet Heart | 8 PM
    92 minutes

The Boston Jewish Film Festival runs Nov 8–20 and will be at the ICA all day on November 19. Check bjff.org for more details.

Join us for the 29th annual Boston Jewish Film Festival, presenting premieres of documentary and narrative films from around the world. Watch films with Jewish themes and hear stories of Jewish life from around the globe and throughout history. Films are followed by in-depth conversations with filmmakers and other special guests.

A Quiet Heart | 8 PM
92 minutes

Other Screenings:

Thee Boston Jewish Film Festival runs Nov 8–20 and will be at the ICA all day on November 19. Check bjff.org for more details.

#DayWithoutArt2017 #AlternateEndingsRadicalBeginnings #VisualAIDS

Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings is the 28th annual iteration of Visual AIDS’ longstanding Day With(out) Art project. Curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett for Visual AIDS, the video program prioritizes Black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic, commissioning seven new and innovative short videos from artists Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye & Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia LaBeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Brontez Purnell.

In spite of the impact of HIV/AIDS within Black communities, these stories and experiences are constantly excluded from larger artistic and historical narratives. In 2016 African Americans represented 44% of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States. Given this context, it is increasingly urgent to feature a myriad of stories that consider and represent the lives of those housed within this statistic. Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings seeks to highlight the voices of those that are marginalized within broader Black communities nationwide, including queer and trans people. 

The commissioned projects include intimate meditations of young HIV positive protagonists; a consideration of community-based HIV/AIDS activism in the South; explorations of the legacies and contemporary resonances within AIDS archives; a poetic journey through New York exploring historical traces of queer and trans life, and more. Together, the videos provide a platform centering voices deeply impacted by the ongoing epidemic. Read more

Created in conjunction with World AIDS Day and Day With(out) Art. Find out more about related programming at visualaids.org


Presented in partnership with Visual AIDS (New York).

Day With(out) Art, 25 Years + Visual AIDS Logo