In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sung the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. Oh My Homeland is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films I’m currently building. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration. A minimal gesture akin to the practice every portrait painter or mother recognizes as ineffably powerful. It is essentially a readymade and like my book Night Moves and my video Tatum's Ghost it continues to explore Youtube as a cultural and social archive.

Oh My Homeland, while being simply a shot of Ms. Price’s face as she receives the applause and before returning to the role, expands with the unaltered meditation on the shot. The transformational power of art for society and the maker alike; the implication of Ms. Price’s race and the context to which she dedicated her life; the staggering political implications of the Verdi aria (a mournful and complicated love letter to Aida’s homeland) in a time in which love of (my) country is hard to muster. – Stephanie Barber

Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic works. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor. Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals. Barber is currently a resident artist at The Mt. Royal MFA for Interdisciplinary Art at MICA in Baltimore, MD and a teaching artist for The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and Image Text Ithaca.

To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits, perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. Peering into layers, sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance. A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience. Structures shift and intermingle, two worlds become one. – James Edmonds

James Edmonds works primarily with super8 and 16mm film as well as painting and music. His practice is driven by a personal poetics in which the act of recording the everyday becomes both a materialist, formal structure and a highly subjective experiential reality in itself - a complex synthesis of presence and memory. His films have been shown at festivals such as TIFF, NYFF, AAFF, Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde and L’ ge d’Or Brussels, amongst others. Solo/duo presentations have occurred at (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico A Coruña, Cinema Parenthèse Brussels, Nocturnal Reflections Milan, 3 137 Athens and Another Vacant Space Berlin. He occasionally writes texts on film and from 2015-2018 curated and ran a film series in Berlin called “Light Movement”.

The proposed metaphysical highs of psychedelic drugs versus the harsh actualities of concrete metropolitan life. These two opposing realities form the backdrop of an adolescent encounter told through still images and written narration. – Morgan Quaintance

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. He is the recipient of the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the 2021 Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal, both for the film Surviving You, Always (2021); the 2020 New Vision Award at CPH:DOX and the 2020 Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal , both for the film South (2020) . Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.

One night in May, seven years ago, Rafael was arriving home from work. Opening the gate, someone called his name. He looked back and saw people he didn’t know. Rafael left his home, taken by these unknown people and he never came back. Since then he has lived as if that night has never ended.” – Affonso Uchôa

Rafael’s intimate account meets the collective testimony of an entire nation oppressed by poverty, police repression, and institutional corruption. Seven Years in May could be read as a political fable that prefigures Brazil’s complex situation, but also as a mythological tale full of hope, in which it is still possible to imagine another future for the country. – Elena Lopez Riera

Affonso Uchôa is a filmmaker based in Contagem, Brazil. He has directed several films that have screened and won awards at international film festivals, such as his 2014 film A Vizinhança Do Tigre (The Hidden Tiger). His previous works include Desígnio (2009), Afternoon Woman (2010), and Araby (2017) (co-directed with João Dumans).

Shooting silently at 25 frames per second, Kämmerer trains his lens on a series of free falling mirrors whose burnished, teal-colored backsides face the camera as they drop vertically through the frame. Against an all-black backdrop, the mirrors fall at rhythmically timed intervals, crashing to the surface in fits of syncopated destruction. As each pane shatters, reflective shards erupt outward, catching brief hints of the surrounding studio lights before being swiftly folded into the film´s clipped montage. The modulating sense of depth and verticality produced by these contrasting elements creates optical patterns and illusions within the 35mm frame that slowly dissolve spatial coordinates by allowing the profilmic event to shape and reshape the viewer´s perception from moment to moment. A tautological consideration of space, disposability, and cinematic iconography (and as such a literal object lesson in repetition), TEAL recalibrates the mind's eye through the subtle application and disruption of familiar forms. -Jordan Cronk

Björn Kämmerer works with film and video art. He was born in Stralsund (GDR), grew up in Berlin, and lives and works in Vienna. From 2002-2008, he studied at Kunstuniversität Linz (Experimental Media Art), and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Art and Digital Media). Since 2003, he has created sixteen moving-image works including ARENA (2018), NAVIGATOR (2015), TORQUE (2012), and Gyre (2010).

The pandemic brandishes the extent of the necropolitics operating in the country and its society goes through a crisis of ethics amidst a government which is the exact expression of colonialist power. República is a film made at home, with a domestic structure, at the beginning of the 2020 quarantine, in downtown Sao Paulo in the neighborhood Republic. - Filme República

Grace Passô is an award winning director, actress and screenwriter, who works in theater and cinema. Her works are widely recognized and acclaimed within the contemporary arts and cultural spheres of Brazil. Passô has acted in the films Praça Paris, In the Heart of the World, and Long Way Home. She co-directed the 2019 film Vaga Carne (with Ricardo Alves Jr.) which was based on the theatrical work that she authored. Most recently, Passô was a featured artist in the 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar and she is preparing for an upcoming exhibition at the Bienal de Arte de São Paulo.

For Cavalcade, Johann Lurf designed and constructed a 150cm-diameter water wheel, with one face divided into various patterned circles of varying shapes and color. It was then fixed in place in a stream; we observe the wheel in rest, motion and rest again from a single vantage point, as it is illuminated by strobe lights synchronised with 35mm cameras. Clockwise and anticlockwise movement disorientingly, magically interweave. Over three minutes the revolutions accelerate in audibly mechanical crescendo, blades spurting water into air; eventually, the atmospheric tree-heavy waterside calm of the night reasserts itself. A hypnotic nocturne which gracefully intersects experimental cinema with the sensational world of the funfair - Lurf's title is evocatively redolent of showbiz spectaculars - Cavalcade provides a fleeting but indelible light in the darkness. This vision persists. - Neil Young

Each time the film flow is interrupted to record an image, the strobe light seemingly freezes the motion of the waterwheel - unleashing its motion patterns and creating an illusion of reversed motion and standstill - contradicting its actual speed. Our perception is tricked twice simultaneously: the illusion of the moving image is created in camera while the illusion of standstill is enforced by the strobing on the water wheel's patterns. -Johann Lurf

Johann Lurf is an artist working primarily with the moving-image. He studied film at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. Since 2003, he has created over a dozen films including the 2017 found-footage feature-length film ★. His works have screened widely at numerous international film festivals and cultural institutions. “Lurf’s films examine various modes of (both human and technologically-aided) vision and motion, but his more formally-oriented filmic experiments are always accompanied by strong narratives that, however subtly, examine society, codes, norms, perception, and the history and development of cinema itself.” (Austrian Cultural Forum New York)

Numerous colonial places, including coastal caves and military bunkers on many Oreums (small volcanoes inside a main volcanic crater) as well as memories of uprisings and massacres are found in every corner of Jeju Island. This work is based on René Magritte's “La Condition Humaine” (1935), which offers a view of the outside of a cave superimposed on a canvas. It also includes some quotes from Hollis Frampton’s performance “A Lecture,” making it the voice for the entire work. - Minjung Kim

Minjung Kim is an artist and a filmmaker based in Seoul, Korea, working primarily in the medium of film and video. She studied Visual Communication Design at Hongik University, Seoul, and earned an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has screened at international film festivals and media art venues including Berlinale, Toronto International Film festival, Sheffield Docs, Edinburgh International Film Festival, SIFF and DMZ docs. Her films have received awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, EXiS, Black Maria and Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival.

Produced from within a series of works dedicated to constructing a critical cosmology of the military dictatorship in Brazil in the exhibition “Meta-Archive 1964–1985” at Sesc-Belenzinho, this cinematographic portrait takes its starting point from Brazilian educator and Indigenous rights militant Egydio Schwade’s archive – Casa da Cultura de Urubuí – containing over 3000 drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari, a people native to the Brazilian Amazon, during their first literacy process. Based on Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, drawings became one of the first methods of knowledge exchange and production between them. During these exercises, the most recurrent question posed by the Waimiri-Atroari was: Why did Kamña (“the civilized”) kill Kiña (Waimiri-Atraori)? Apiyemiyekî? (Why?). The drawings document and construct a collective visual memory from their learning process, perspective, and territory while attesting to a series of violent attacks they were subjected to during the dictatorship. The film animates and transposes their drawings to the landscapes and sights that they narrate, searching to echo their question and trusting that memory is a necessary engine to build a common future. - Berlinale Forum Expanded

Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances speculate upon the relationships between myth and history, self and other through a cosmology of references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation in exploring the f(r)ictions imprinted upon cultivated and savage environments. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy, Ana was also a member of the SPEAP (School of Political Arts), a project directed by Bruno Latour. Recent screenings of her work include the NYFF, TIFF, Courtisane, Cinéma du Réel (Grand Prix) & specific focuses dedicated to her work at the Flaherty Seminar (USA) and Doc's Kingdom (Portugal). Her work has featured in major group shows such as the Moscow Biennial of Young Art & the Dhaka Art Summit. In 2015, she received the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work.

A naive look at Southern California by an outsider, and/or an essay on displacement through the disjunction of Californian images and off screen voices. Where is the location of these voices, here or there? Are the images near or far in relation to the voices? Are the images commenting on the images or vice versa? - Babette Mangolte

Babette Mangolteis a French cinematographer, film director, and photographer and she has lived and worked in the United States since 1970. Mangolte has directed over twenty films including What Maisie Knew (1975), The Sky on Location (1978), Visible Cities (1991), Les Modèles de Pickpocket (2001), Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramović (2007), and Edward Krasiński’s Studio (2012). She is also known for her photographic archive, which documents the experimental theater, dance and performance scene of the 1970s and 1980s including the performance works of notable choreographers such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, and Yvonne Rainer. As a cinematographer Mangolte has collaborated with Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow, Jackie Raynal, Sally Potter, Marcel Hanoun, and Jean Pierre Gorin among others. Mangolte is interested in creating architectural spaces, which propose various modes of interactivity for the spectators with the photographs, films and texts shown in her installations. Her work has been the subject of several retrospectives and is in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, Reina Sofia Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, and MoMA New York.

Rivers run red, planes hover over waters, ships travel in darkness, and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target. “I had a recurring dream that I was walking in the woods and a hunter mistook me for a bird. I could hear him moving through the forest. I always woke up before the gun was fired, but that feeling of apprehension would stay with me throughout the day. Lately, even without dreaming this dream, that apprehension is present.” – Geiser

Reverse Shadow draws on a range of sources, from a child’s target practice game to brochures of WW2 warplanes, medical books, panoramic photographs, and iphone videos shot from an airplane seat. The sound collage includes, among other sources, recordings of Cold War shortwave “numbers stations” and an Edison recording of the Rip Van Winkle story. Immersed in an atmosphere of suspended apprehension, we sense disaster is waiting, waiting to happen.

Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and visual art. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its sense of suspended time. Geiser’s films have been screened at numerous international film festivals and other venues including the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, Microscope Gallery, the Guggenheim Museum, MOMA, Pacific Film Archives, the Centre Pompidou, the Salzburg Museum, SF MOMA, LACMA, and the Sharjah Biennial, among many others. Geiser’s films are in the collections of MOMA, The NY Public Library’s Donnell Media Center, CalArts, and others. Her film The Red Book is part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. One of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde puppet theater, Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic performances and installations that integrate performing objects, puppets, and projection. Her work has been presented at The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Redcat, The Walker Art Center, and other venues. Geiser’s work has been recognized with a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an OBIE Award. She is a founding Co-Director of Automata, an artist-run performance gallery in Los Angeles.

Early Years is a portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels. It features an account of her first generation, diasporic experience in London, and her discovery of the liberatory possibilities for self-actualisation offered by an early entry into creative life. - Morgan Quaintance

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. He is the recipient of the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the 2021 Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal, both for the film Surviving You, Always (2021); the 2020 New Vision Award at CPH:DOX and the 2020 Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal , both for the film South (2020) . Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.

A private memory is examined and explored through a simple personality test found on the internet. The photographs and sounds, recorded by the interviewee at the forest and other places, become distorted and transformed by the artist or the audience. In the reconstructed forest, the questioner, the interviewee, and the audience start to picture images of an animal, a house, a sound of water, and beyond.

Justin Jinsoo Kim is an experimental filmmaker based in Santa Clarita, CA and Seoul, South Korea. Kim’s work aims to discover new relationships in images and frames by exploring the possibilities of animation techniques. He starts by experimenting with various cinematic techniques and expands to stories related to a personal narrative or a philosophical inquiry. He received an MFA in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. Kim’s work has been selected in various festivals including Annecy International Animation Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival and EXiS (Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul).