City

No Damage is a composition made out of fragments from over 80 different feature and documentary films that show the architecture of New York City — its architectural presence as captured on film over eight decades. Lifted out of their original context and juxtaposed in groups, these scenes reveal their emotional implications: grandeur, glamour, the wake of modernism, post-modernism and, most recently, post 9/11 sentimentalism. A number of particular clips that resonate such emotions enter into a non-verbal discourse on age, status, functionality and aesthetics.

White Balance (to think is to forget differences) is an effort to uncover the geographies of power, the frontiers of privilege. It revisits this problem from different angles, creating short circuits of meaning which are hosted by improbable audiovisual matches. Media and internet footage is intermixed with images shot in downtown Manhattan before and after the September 11th attacks.

Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.

Performers: Anna Yu, Shu Xia Zhao
Cinematography: Steve Cossman
Voice: Joanna Lin, Shu Xia Zhao
Music: Ikue Mori
Production: Xiao Li Tan

The New York City summer is fueled by the sultry emanations of hot air that tumble off the tongues of potential thespians as they attempt to decipher the gastric guesswork embedded in the prose of the pre-production process. The video camera flits across the boroughs of NYC in a splash-dash sojourn of sumptuous banquets and bohemian bombast, while the down-to-earth wisdom of the seeing impaired helps to guide the protagonist into detours of wisdom befitting his putrid project.

Filmed from the artist’s window during lockdown, Citadel combines short fragments from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speeches relating to coronavirus with views of the London skyline recorded in a variety of weather conditions. Recognising the government’s decision to place business interests before public health, it relocates the centre of power from Parliament to the financial district of the City of London.

“The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density. Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined.”

— Kengo Kuma

A film titled Dance Movie (or, alternatively, Rollerskate) appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title has been found in the archive. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko, was shot in 1963. A year later, Herko leaped out of an open window while dancing to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Inspired by descriptions of the missing film and the memoir of Herko’s best friend, the poet Diane Di Prima, Goddess of Speed poetically reimagines the last days of the young performer.

This film originated as an expanded portrait of artist Carol Bove as she created four monumental sculptures commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One week after filming began, New York City went into its first pandemic lockdown. Filmed against the backdrop of the progressing pandemic, Medium evolved into a meditation on materiality and the artist as a medium through which ideas move into the world.

Stardust is the second part of the trilogy where Nicolas Provost investigates the boundaries of fiction and reality by filming everyday life with a hidden high resolution camera and turning the cinematic images into a fiction film by using cinematographic and narrative codes from the Hollywood film language. The first part of the trilogy was the award winning Plot Point (2007) that was shot entirely with a hidden camera and turned everyday life around Times Square, New York into a thriller film.

Jem Cohen assembles images that demonstrate the economization of public space; the stock exchange on a LED display board, the company logo on cars, the mobile phone as tool of e-commerce. This Climate is not about the change of weather but the change of mental constitution.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT/SUMMARY: This film centers around one performance, when Holland-based musicians, The Ex, visited New York to play a concert. This performance is intercut with city scenes, first from Amsterdam and then New York, of construction sites, street life, and protests against the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The construction site scenes relate to the band's dedication to music as a realm for collaborative building and creative destruction.

An insert square of a man running is superimposed over a magnified mouth that speaks to him — first in nurturing encouragement, then with a no-win Mommie Dearest kind of criticism. Originally presented as an installation on six monitors, Deadline focuses on “the stress man feels in the urban environment,” using a range of digital video effects to stretch, compress, flip and fracture the image.

"I brought live reptiles, birds of prey and exotic flowers to a very stereotyped and neglected section of the city of St. Louis, Missouri which suffers from from severe abandonment and despair, but also has many tranquil vacant lots where nature flourishes. I chose these birds of prey for their symbolic meaning- The bald eagle a symbol of the United States, hawks and owls are messengers.  But this is not a film about St. Louis, It's about an anonymous archetype more than a specific locale. St.

Primavera is a frenetic experimental animation that documents the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests as they intersect in springtime Brooklyn. Shot during isolation on a phone, the video explores the effects of imposed distance on touch and intimacy, the proximity of an invisible virus and invisible deaths, and the revolt against the racist, corrupt systems that commodify, exploit and render their most vulnerable citizens disposable.

THE DRESS: is a projection prop created for a performance piece at the Art Institute in 1984. It was installed in March 2021, suspended in front of a building on the Bowery as both a memorial to my grandmother, a Hungarian immigrant and master seamstress, and to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, of 1911, which occurred a few blocks north of this site.

-EJay Sims

In collaboration with DonChristian Jones.

Nocturne is a 5-minute film shot entirely at night in deserted streets of London. The film attempts to find images of the city that reveal the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, hinting at a concealed history. The deserted streets around the east end of London and Docklands reflect an echoic city filled with shadows. Nocturne is composed of long static viewpoints, each shot slowly unfolding in time as though by looking long enough the city's secrets will be revealed.

A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy. On an Internet dating site she writes: 'I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves...' What I'm Looking For, a 15-minute high definition video, documents this adventure; the connections formed at this intersection between virtual and actual public space. The video is a rumination on the nature of photography and the persistence of vision. It is a short tale of desire and control.

KG ruminates through performance and a portrait of Athens, on excerpts from poems in a book of poetry by Katerina Gogou entitled Three Clicks Left.

Performer: Kleoni Manousakis Music, Zeena Parkins

¡Macho Shogun! was created by Reed Anderson and Daniel Davidson over a single weekend some time in 2000.  It's your basic monster-robot / destroy-city kind of video that we wanted to make when we were kids but never did.

This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

Documentation of the installation The Future of Metropolis at Technical University in Berlin, Germany.

The Diaspora Suite

Filmed on location in Harlem (NY) and Ethiopia, Forged Ways oscillates between the first person account of a filmmaker, a man navigating the streets of Harlem, and the day to day life in the cities and villages of Ethiopia.

Take a trip into and out of the body to ponder Time’s endless depths where Earth spirits roam and inner Demons lurk, and find secrets that hide behind the "self". Its here for you to see.

This title comprises Moon Lit Vows (2017), Boy in the Mirror (2015), Celestial Horizons (2019), Book of the Angel (2017) and Floating on the Currents of Consciousness (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Though it constructs a documentary record of blight and decay, still/here is a refusal of closure that dwells within the space of rupture and confronts the presence of a profound absence.

–– Christopher Harris

Camera, sound, edit: Christopher Harris

Additional camera: Joel Wanek

A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a re-cataloguer, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images that he puts before us – his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse.