AVA'S POSSESSIONS, ROAD GAMES, CAMINO, EMELIE BEGIN

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Jesse Jones and Seamus Harahan: Irish artists on Northern Ireland 

presented by Mariah Garnett on Sunday, March 6, 2016

LOS ANGELES - Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Mariah Garnett has spent the greater part of 2015 working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In this screening, Garnett brings to Los Angeles Filmforum recent digital videos by Irish artists from both sides of the border whose work depicts, directly and indirectly, the effects of the conflict in Northern Ireland on its population. Although vastly different in style-ranging from lyrical first-person photography to geographically displaced theatrical reenactment-the videos in this program use art as a means to make the effects of the conflict perceptible and felt. Garnett will be present to introduce and discuss the program.

What: Jesse Jones and Seamus Harahan: Irish artists on Northern Ireland presented by Mariah Garnett

When: Sunday, March 6, 2016, 7 pm

Where: At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028

Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.

Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://bpt.me/2507673

or at the door.

More details: www.lafilmforum.org  <http://www.lafilmforum.org>  

Screening:

Digital Videos by Seamus Harahan

Seamus Harahan's video, installation, film, and sound based practice engages directly with place. His starting point is not the making of art; instead his strategy is to forget and just film the social and cultural environment around him. Harahan uses his video camera - a relatively accessible and moderately affordable technology - to take hand-held, seemingly amateur footage, the contents of this footage, locating himself and locating others, through found activity occurring around him. The main subject is often the urban environment, its incidental detail and fugitive nature. Music is a vital element in all of Harahan's works, with songs used as soundtracks or informing the composition, title or duration of individual pieces. The artist takes songs from an eclectic range of sources, including reggae and hip hop as well as English and Irishtraditional music.

Jesse Jones, The Other North

2013, Digital Video, color, sound, 59 minutes

The Other North developed from Jones' research in 2012 and 2013 in South Korea and the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the strip of land that divides the Korean peninsula and acts as a 'buffer' between North and South. Jones' experiences in Korea led to an exploration of archival footage from Northern Ireland dating from thelate 1960s to the 1990s. The Other North evolved from research into a film called The Steel Shutter, 1974, which documents a "conflict resolution therapy session" held by American psychologist Carl Rogers in the early 1970s with individuals from various political and socio-economic backgrounds in Northern Ireland. Using transcripts of these therapy sessions as scripts to be performed by actors as verbatim theatre, Jones re-stages the event in Korea, re-enacting the film with eleven Korean actors.

The transfer of the historical narrative of Northern Ireland to a Korean context aims to create a Brechtian estrangement; a vacillation between the self and the other. Through its simultaneous presentation of the vernacular and uncanny, The Other North provides an opportunity to consider the effects of cultural, political, and national divisions, and their influence on individuals beyond geographic, political and psychological borders.

Biographies:

Seamus Harahan was a director of Catalyst Arts Belfast from 1996-98. His work was featured in  Assembly, A survey of Recent Artists' Flms and Video in Britain 2008-13 at Tate Britain, London.  Cold Open received the Jury Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, in 2014. He represented Northern Ireland in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2009. He was artist in residence at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, in spring 2015. He lives and works in Belfast and is represented in London by Gimpel Fils. In 2015 he was received the Jarman Award.

Born in Dublin in 1978, Jesse Jones creates works that primarily take the form of film and video. She explores historical instances of communal culture and resistance that resonate with contemporary society and politics. Her practice uses devices such drive-in cinemas, film, music and performance in order to explore popular culture as a site of shared collective social consciousness. Jones has recently had solo-exhibitions at Artsonje Seoul, Spike Island, Bristol, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, and REDCAT, Los Angeles, as well as projects at The New Museum, New York, and Serpentine Cinema, London. She is currently in the production phase of Prosperity, which is the artist's largest project to date and consists of a multi-disciplinary collaborative public art commission inDublin which aims to deconstruct the idea of prosperity in Ireland's post boom economy.

Acknowledgements:

This program is supported by the Bloomberg Philanthropies; Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of LosAngeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents

Carrie Mae Weems: Coming Up For Air

Thursday, March 10, 2016, 7:00 pm

LOS ANGELES,- Los Angeles Filmforum is thrilled to present a theatrical screening of Carrie Mae Weems' exceptional, feature-length video Coming Up For Air. Created between 2003 and 2005, Coming Up For Air marks Weems' first major foray into video and weaves together a series of visually striking, dramatic vignettes depictingchildren preparing for a history lesson, the Kennedy assassination, quarrelling sisters and the relationship between black men and white women in Antebellum New Orleans.

Weems has described herself as a "narrator of history," and Coming Up for Air is a tremendous historical feat, traversing the bombing of Hiroshima, the assassination of Medgar Evers, 1960's political demonstrations and the Obama Presidency. Eliding straightforward narrative, the video elaborates upon the investigations of race, gender, politics and power evident in her earlier photographic series, combining archival footage with staged reenactments to expose the construction of history and its ongoing reverberations. The video's direct historical inquiries are interspersed with portraits of family and intimacy, situating cultural memory within an intricate web of personal experience.

Carrie Mae Weems is an acclaimed contemporary artist whose works in photography, video and installation use storytelling to express the human condition. Over the course of the past thirty years she has produced bodies of work including Colored People (1989-1990), the Kitchen Table Series (1990), The Louisiana Project (2003), and Slow Fade to Black (2010). She earned her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work was the subject of the 2007 solo exhibition All About Eve: Women, Sex, and Desire at the W.E.B. Dubois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and the 2013 retrospective Carrie Mae Weems Three Decades of Photography and Video curated by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. In 2013 she received a Macarthur Foundation Fellowship  and in 2016 she received a Distinguished Feminist Award from the College Art Association.

". . . Weems positions herself as history's ghost...." -Nancy Princethal, Art In America

". . . one of the most honored American artists of her generation. Weems asks inconvenient questions and comes up with unwelcome answers. For that alone, no contemporary artist's work is more important." -David Bonetti, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

What: Carrie Mae Weems: Coming Up For Air

When: Thursday, March 10, 2016, 7:00 pm. Note the change from our usual day & time

Where: MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

INFO education@moca.org < mailto:education@moca.org> or 213.621.1745

TICKETS $12 general admission, $7 students with valid ID

FREE for Los Angeles Filmforum and MOCA members

Tickets available in advance at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258310

Screening:

Coming Up For Air, 2003-05?

Digital video, color?, sound, 52.5 minutes

Carrie Mae Weems, Pamela Vander Zwan (Assistant Producer)

Carrie Mae Weems' first major video work Coming Up for Air (2003-05) features a series of vignettes beginning with a group of children preparing to bear witness to history. Visually sumptuous and diverse in their subject matter, the videosdemonstrate Weems' use of dramatic cinematic techniques, evidencing the influence of Federico Fellini and Chris Marker, to extend the vocabulary of her photographs. Amongst the video's other segments are a depiction of young lovers, a young girl and her father, political assassinations and devastation of Hiroshima.

Courtesy the artist and JackShainman Gallery, New York

Programmed by Alison Kozberg

Acknowledgements:

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA is supported through both organizations by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Additional support of Filmforum's screeningseries comes from Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA furthers MOCA's mission to question and adapt to the changing definitions of art and to care for the urgency of contemporary expression with bimonthly screenings of film and video organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum-the city's longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation.

For more on Los Angeles Filmforum, visit lafilmforum.org, or email lafilmforum@yahoo.com. For more information on MOCA, visit moca.org.