Spanning 13 decades of filmmaking, from pre-cinema to post-internet, this guest curated, six-part screening and performance series challenges the idea that the worlds of sports and art are mutually exclusive. The Game is Not the Thing offers an antidote to commercial documentary and mainstream feature film narratives, looking instead to the creative and critical approaches that artists and amateurs bring to the “sports film.” In conjunction with the series, curators Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere produced a new moving image work, Jordan Wept, to be featured online and in the Walker Cinema.
Related article: Curators Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere co-authored an article on the Walker Reader, No Time for Winners, exploring the relationship between moving image, sports, identity, resistance, and pleasure.
The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image
Friday, October 11–Friday, November 8, 2024
Walker Cinema
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Astria Suparak’s cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science-fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Her work as an artist has been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and ArtScience Museum, Singapore. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances for the Liverpool Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Kitchen, and Expo Chicago, as well as for such unconventional spaces as roller-skating rinks, sports bars, and rock clubs. Based in Oakland, California, Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Artadia Award.
Brett Kashmere is a filmmaker, curator, and writer living in Oakland, California. His creative and scholarly practice reframes dominant narratives about sports and illuminates new perspectives and histories. Kashmere’s films and videos have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Kassel Documentary Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Photography, UnionDocs, CROSSROADS, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. He is executive director of Canyon Cinema Foundation, founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and co-editor of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! Kashmere holds a PhD in film & digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Power Plays
Friday, October 11, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors, free for students)
Walker Cinema
Tool for exploitation or arena of resistance? In this screening, themes of nationalism, militarism, racial capitalism, and spectacle converge in the arena of the global sports media complex. Through an interplay of technology, visuality, and public space, these films tee up a critical interrogation of sports as a site for control, struggle, and collective fantasy.
Introduced by Brett Kashmere and Astria Suparak.
World/AntiWorld: On Seeing Double, a lecture performance by Haig Aivazian
Saturday, October 12, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors, and students)
Walker Cinema
Beirut-based artist Haig Aivazian’s lecture-performance examines how professional sports, public space, and the law converge with the history and future of surveillance and weapons systems. In a narrative structured around three explosions that occurred outside France’s national football stadium in 2015, the artist zooms in on the blurred lines between the street and the stadium. Aivazian describes a world and anti-world where our individual and collective selves exist under the watchful eyes of law, capital, and machines.
Introduced by Brett Kashmere and Astria Suparak.
Aesthetic Athletics
Friday, October 18, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors, free for students)
Walker Cinema
From boxing, ping-pong, and golf to water polo, football, and tennis, this screening charts a century of formalist interventions into sports-media imagery. Featuring works by pioneering video and media artists such as Nam June Paik and Lillian Schwartz, this program highlights the many different ways that artists make images, from multiple exposure, hand-altered Super 8, and stop-motion animation to video-game graphics and animated GIFs.
All Eyes on Me
Thursday, October 24, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members, seniors, and students)
Walker Cinema
Get pumped! Framed around the fetishized spectacle of the ideal athletic body, this screening of short films looks at the unattainable (for most) muscular form as a subject of athletic introspection. From silent film to social media, these films take on the insidious sexism of sports commentating, look at gendered “accent gestures” in gymnastics, and feature an introspective Arnold Schwarzenegger likening himself to a sculptor with his body as the material. What a flex!
Olympic Efforts
Friday, November 1, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors, free for students)
Walker Cinema
We are the champions! Looking beyond the nation-building and political motives of global sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup, this screening of short films covers regional sporting traditions such as Senegalese laamb wrestling, Shaolin martial arts, and the Tour de France. Populist localized events serve as occasions for collective catharsis and cultural expression that allow communities to share values, relations, and histories.
No Goal
Friday, November 8, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors, free for students)
Walker Cinema
It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. Though sport often reinforces dominant values and hierarchies of power, it is also a source of passion, pleasure, identity, and rebellion. Sometimes, play for the sake of play can also be a radical, disruptive force. Explore the utopian potential of sport: a purposeful purposelessness, a community square, an occasion to stunt, a non-zero-sum game. No winners, no losers, no goals?