Svetlana Romanova and Chelsea Tuggle, Season of Dying Water, 2022. Image courtesy the artist.
Тарыҥ (Season of Dying Water) by Svetlana Romanova and Chelsea Tuggle, with Letter from Siberia by Chris Marker
May 5–6, 2023, 7 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, students)
Shot in and around Yakutsk, in a remote region of Siberia, Svetlana Romanova and Chelsea Tuggle’s Тарыҥ (Season of Dying Water) (2022) wrestles with the complex realities of a people and place facing continual, rapid transformation under Russia’s drive for resource extraction. Some 65 years earlier, Chris Marker’s essayistic short film Letter from Siberia (1957) examines the same region during a different era of Soviet colonial expansion. As a pair, these films speak to each other, with Romanova and Tuggle’s film operating as a kind of letter back to Marker.
This screening will be accompanied by an essay by asinnajaq, commissioned for the Walker Reader. She originally curated these films as part of the series let’s all be lichen, presented at Flaherty NYC in 2022.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
asinnajaq is from Inukjuak, Nunavik, and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Her work includes filmmaking, writing, and curating. She co-created Tilliraniit, a three-day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. asinnajaq’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and film festivals around the world. She wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017), a short sci-fi documentary. She co-curated Isuma’s presence in the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale and also co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq, the Inuit art center in Winnipeg. In 2020 asinnajaq received a Sobey Art Award.
Chris Marker (1921–2012) was a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia artist, considered to be among the most influential French filmmakers of the postwar era. A cinematic essayist and audiovisual poet, Marker rejected conventional narrative techniques, instead staking out a deeply political terrain defined by the use of still images, atmospheric soundtracks, and literate commentary. His best-known films include Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia) (1957), La Jetée (1962), Le Joli Mai (1963), Sans Soliel (1983), and Level Five (1997). In 1996 Marker’s video installation Silent Movie was included in the Walker exhibition Chris Marker and William Klein: Silent Movie/Moving Pictures, a collaboration with the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Marker’s La Jetée is part of the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Evenk) was born in Yakutsk, Russia, and studied visual arts in Los Angeles. She received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design, and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts. From 2009 to 2014, she studied, lived, and worked in arts education in California. After returning to Siberia in 2015, Romanova started working on several film projects about her hometown and the regions around it. Her video practice is an investigation of two local Indigenous groups to which she belongs: Sakha and Evenk. In 2022 she curated the online project Self-Directed Visual Culture of the World’s Indigenous Women, as a part of Terrestrial Voices for the AyarKut Foundation for the Support of Contemporary Art in Yakutia (Republic of Sakha), Russia.
Chelsea Tuggle is a filmmaker and artist living in Los Angeles. Tuggle’s work was recently in the 2022 group exhibition Save Up Laughter for Winter, which was dedicated to the contemporary art of Yakutia (Republic of Sakha), at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
Shared Resources by Jordan Lord
May 19–20, 2023, 7 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, students)
“Staging an immanent critique of documentary, Lord’s films challenge the presumed neutrality and universality of vision, upending the pet adage ‘Show don’t tell,’ in order to reclaim the subjectivity of description.” —Artforum
After Jordan Lord’s father gets fired from his job as a debt collector, the artist follows their family over the term of a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Set within domestic scenes in their Mississippi home, Lord’s documentary Shared Resources incorporates open captioning and audio descriptions to portray multiple viewpoints on shared financial and emotional debts and promises, reframing ethical questions about what is owed in consent and contracts. 2021, US, DCP, 98 min. With open captions and visual descriptions.
Join us for a post-screening conversation with artists Jordan Lord and Emma Hedditch after Friday’s screening.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jordan Lord(US) is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access, and documentary. Their films have been shown at festivals and venues including MoMA Doc Fortnight, Dokufest Kosovo, Union Docs, and the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. Their film Shared Resources (2021) won the John Marshall Award for Contemporary Ethnographic Media at the Camden International Film Festival and the Critics Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They have presented solo exhibitions at Piper Keys and Artists Space. In 2021, they were profiled as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine, and their work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Screen Slate, Art in America, Millennium Film Journal, and Hyperallergic. They are currently teaching at Vassar College, the New School, and Hunter College.
Emma Hedditch (born in 1972, GB), a New York-based artist, examines what is produced and negotiated within the format of public presentations, especially those that resist the standard protocols of a cultural institution. Hedditch has worked with Cinenova, a feminist film and video distributor (1999–present), Copenhagen Free University (2001–2008), No Total, a site for performance (2012–present), and Coop Fund, a member organized funding cooperative (2018- present). Hedditch has participated in group exhibitions including Coop Fund, Amalle Dublon & Constantina Zavitsanos, Devin Kenny, John Neff, Artists Space (2018), Finesse, curated by Leah Pires, Wallach Art Gallery, New York (2018), Claim a hand in the field that makes this form foam at Outpost Gallery in Norwich (GB), and Other Romances, curated by Em Rooney at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York (2017). Hedditch has published texts in Afterall, Mute Magazine, and Art Monthly, and contributed to the books Rereading Appropriation (If I Can’t Dance, 2015) and Anarchic Sexual Desires of Plain Unmarried Schoolteachers (Selected Press, 2015). Hedditch’s self-published work includes A Political Feeling, I Hope So, Coming to Have a Public Life, Is it Worth it? and the e-book of performance scripts, I Don’t Want you to Work as Me, I Want you to Work for Me.