Mason Leaver-Yap was the Walker's Bentson Moving Image Scholar.
As much a poetic enigma as it is a portrait of identity, Yto Barrada’s new film takes as its starting point the work and life of Thérèse Rivière (1901–1970), a French anthropologist whose remarkable working life was cut short following her confinement in psychiatric institutions.
Marwa Arsanios’s new film examines the structures of self-governance and knowledge production fostered by the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement. She asks: what kinds of democracies are enabled without a state, and what kind of ecology is produced under the conditions of war?
Following the path of not-knowing, Renée Green’s new film is a cinematic meditation on lived experience, writing, film and mourning. Conceived as a “film as a conversation,” Green’s ED/HF is a palimpsestic work that touches on the many thresholds opened while thinking about an artist’s life and work. Questions of language, history, and image reproduction technologies are rendered into a touching threnody, a mournful celebration of the power of art, film and poetry.
(2017, video, 33 minutes)
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin, Germany, since 2007. Their staged films and film installations often start with a song, a picture, a film or a script from the past. Recent solo exhibitions include Portrait of an Eye, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2015; Loving, Repeating, Kunsthalle Wien, 2015; and Patriarchal Poetry, Badischer Kunstverein, 2013. Their book Temporal Drag was published by Hatje Cantz (2011), the Aftershow catalogue by Sternberg (2014), and their most recent catalogue I Want, Sternberg Press (2016).
Mason Leaver-Yap, who produces Walker Moving Image Commissions, discusses the series with two of the five participating artists—Leslie Thornton and James Richards—and the legacy projects that have emerged since.
My first encounter with Moyra Davey’s video work was as an intern in the New Media Department at the Centre Pompidou in 2012. I was instructed to review a collection of video works to make sure they were playing correctly (i.e., intern work). I watched the videos at my computer with headphones on, in imposed isolation at the office
