BREATH WORK
EXPS/SLC explores the idea of “moving through” with new screening, BREATH WORK
EXPS/SLC brings us screening #5: BREATH WORK
This program of experimental films explores the idea of “moving through”. Integrating text, gesture, dance, and landscape, these short films ask: what does the body remember?
Experimental Series - Salt Lake City is an experimental video/film series hosted at the Union Theatre at the University of Utah. Programming selections prioritize experimental, avant-garde, or radical approaches to documenting movement in film and video.
Tuesday January 31 at 7:30PM. Union Theatre, 200 Central Campus Drive, Salt Lake City.
All programs are free and open to the public.
For more information about EXPERIMENTAL SERIES – SALT LAKE CITY and upcoming screenings visit IG @exps.slc
Works for this screening include:
sky studies.xe, dir. Annie Peterson (2022, video, 2:37 - looped pre-show) diy body cam[corder] work that denies the conventional third-person gaze of a recorded event and instead claims first person-ness through the sternum, head, shoulder, and hand. The first person-ness of motion folds in on itself, disorienting and fleeting.
VIEWFINDER (2020, video, 19:53min), dir. Crystal Z CampbellFilmed entirely in Sweden, Viewfinder explores the gesture of place, belonging, and monuments.
The Porous Body (2018, video, 6:15min), dir. Sofia El KhyariA young woman who lives in her thoughts goes back to the sea to centre herself. As she dives into the water, she dives under her skin and penetrates her psychological wrapping.A meditative poetic trip inside the skin.
Bha Iad Làn Sgeulachdan (2021, Super 8 to Video, 5:58min), dir. Todd FraserIn Bha Iad Làn Sgeulachdan, my grandfather Willie Francis Fraser reflects on the long-form storytelling he heard in his youth on Cape Breton Island, his relationship to the Gaelic language, and his extraordinary experience of learning to dance in a series of dreams he had as a boy.
What Does the Body K/Now (2021, Video, 5:13min), dir. Leila Awadallah"What Does Body K/Now" is a gathering of footages taken from February 2020 to February 2021. Each video was originally intended to only serve as archival research during different artistic residencies (institutional and self-created) over the past year. This film attempts to make a broken choreography out of the improvisations, the contexts defining the moment, the soul of places; choosing the clips based on the intensity of memories formed from either the surroundings of that time / place or what emotional horcruxes are hidden in the scene. A self reflective study where I am asking, searching inside the footage for the answer to the question: what does my body know now -- after all of this? What do OUR bodies know now, after this? A 'this' that is unstable, unbound, and unique to each of us.
Applied Pressure (2018, Video, 6:26min), dir. Kelly SearsSequential images sourced from dozens of massage books are activated to reflect on recent public conversation from this past year surrounding bodies, massage, and trauma.Ease the pain from past physical and mental distress. The body remembers. Aches may linger. Lay prone, breathe deeply, release tension.
Currency (2019, Video, 2:53min), dir. Crystal Z CampbellCurrency (2019) is a performance film of refusal: a woman wears bygone forms of currency on the tips of her hair while preserving the greatest currency for herself.
Proud Crying Faces of Resistance – Katya (2022, Video, 1:53), dir. ARSÈNEKatya walks around in Kyiv. She stops in front of a destroyed building and recites a poem by Mykola Kholodnyy. A russian missile fell right into that building. Some other days, she lays on abandoned checkpoints or other military structures. It is her way, to cope with the new reality of war. Proud Crying Faces of Resistance is an experimental documentary portraying the struggle of young Ukrainians facing the recent russian invasion. noonwraith blues (2020, Video, 3:29min), dir. Kamila KucOminous 35mm cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 Melencolia print are intercut, like cascading scythes, with saturated super-8 film of a woman in a fresh-cut farm field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. Specters of familial anxieties creep into this loose take on the myth of Poludnica (noonwraith or Lady Midday), a Slavic harvest spirit that could cause madness in those who wandered the fields alone. The starting point for this subtle portrayal of the familial effects of transgenerational trauma is Erwin Panofsky’s Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1955) in which he associates Dürer’s engravings with fear, withdrawal, depression and madness. In this pastoral horror, luscious landscape serves as the site of a woman’s idyllic childhood memories but ones that are disturbed by her ancestors’ experiences of wars and domestic violence. The interplay of the banal and the uncanny is highly suggestive as the film poses a question of whether the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics?
Last Words [sic] (2017, Video, 5:53min), dir. Hugo LjungbäckAn ex-boyfriend's goodbye-letter tells a humorously painful story of lost love, betrayal, and desire, as the author grows increasingly delusional, defensive, and passive-aggressive with each paragraph.
Respiration (2019, 16mm to Video, 4:30), dir. Sasha Water FreyersRiver naiads and backyard deities; nothing noticed is lonely. From inspiration to expiration, breathing is the only work to be enacted now. A 16mm film collage of original and found/archival footage.
