April screenings and presentations

Join us this April at Bar Laika for a series of events featuring Harun Farocki, Chto Delat, Tarek Atoui, and Mariam Ghani; and a special program co-presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center on the occasion of Art of the Real’s sixth edition, featuring Eric Baudelaire and Erika Balsom.

Program

Harun Farocki, Parallel III and IV
Thursday, April 4, 9pm

Continuing from parts I and II screened last month, Bar Laika is very pleased to present parts III and IV of Harun Farocki’s Parallel. Farocki’s four-part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape, and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds. Parallel III (7:21 minutes, 2014) seeks out the backdrops of game worlds and the nature of their digital objects. It reveals digital worlds which take the form of discs floating in the universe—reminiscent of pre-Hellenistic conceptions of the universe. The animated worlds appear as one-sided theater stages, flat backdrops revealed only by the movements of an omniscient camera. The objects in the worlds often do not react to “natural forces.” Each of their properties must be separately constructed and assigned to them. Parallel IV (11:20 minutes, 2014) explores the actions of the heroes and protagonists of the video game world. These heroes have no parents or teachers; they must test their relationships with others and determine, of their own accord, the rules to follow. Farocki notes these characters are “homunculi, anthropomorphist beings, created by humans. Whoever plays with them has a share in the creator’s pride.”

Chto Delat, One Night in a Social Network: An Opera-Farce
Thursday, April 11, 9pm

It looks like we’re living in a time of emotional turn. “What is truth and what is not” no longer depends on the possibility of reasoning but on the heavy emotional impact of communication. We can observe this turn in the pervasiveness of the culture of emojis and GIF animations in our daily interactions, from social networks to personal communications. In this film, we see a room with a table in the middle of it. On one side of the table, a lone user is deeply engrossed reading his social media feed and clicking links. On the other side, four emojis communicate with him and permanently construct and manipulate the content of the news. Under the table, a Russian troll makes comments, chooses this or that content. The whole action starts when the user receives information about the killing of Arcady Babchenko—a notorious Russian journalist who lived in exile in the Ukraine. The user with the help of trolls and Emoji starts follows the case and jump into surreal world of post-truth. The journey finishes when in the morning he receives information that Arcady Babchenko is resurrected and his death was a special operation of secret services.

Satellite 6: Tarek Atoui
Thursday, April 18, 8:30pm

Join us at Bar Laika for the sixth edition of Satellite, featuring Tarek Atoui. Tarek Atoui is a Lebanese artist and electroacoustic composer based in Paris. Atoui engineers complex and original instruments that challenge and expand our ways of understanding and experiencing sound. His work WITHIN, a collaboration with Pauline Oliveros, explores new instruments and performance techniques developed for a deaf audience. For his project The Reverse Collection, Atoui invited a group of musicians to play instruments of unknown age and origin at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. From these recordings, Atoui wrote scores for improvised pieces for the same instruments and performed them at the 8th Berlin Biennale. Atoui has presented works at Sharjah Biennial 9 and 11, Sharjah; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; documenta, Kassel; Berlin Biennale; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, among other places.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi.

Art of the Real Spotlights: Eric Baudelaire, “To Do With”
Sunday, April 21, 9pm

Now celebrating its sixth year, Art of the Real is the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual survey of the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction moving-image cinema and art. Organized by Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes, each edition features a selection of Spotlights that take a closer look at a range of practices in experimental documentary. This year, AOTR will collaborate with e-flux Bar Laika to present two spotlight events at Bar Laika with artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire and scholar and critic Erika Balsom (see below). Eric Baudelaire’s films are research-driven, playful, experimental works that traverse aesthetic approaches—from landscape film to para-drama to essay. Frequently these projects are initiated by a dialogue or improvised set of rules developed between the artist and a collaborator. With works spanning the past decade—including selections from [SIC] (2009), The Makes (2010), Letters to Max (2014), and the work-in-progress A Dramatic Film, the result of a four-year collaboration with a group of Paris Banlieue middle-schoolers—this program engages with the artist’s process of “protocol” and its profound and original results.

Mariam Ghani, Selected Video Works
Thursday, April 25, 9pm

Bar Laika is very pleased to present an evening with Mariam Ghani, featuring a screening of selected video works and Q&A with the artist. Kabul 2, 3, 4 (2002–07, 13:00 minutes, excerpt 6:00 minute) is a six-minute single-channel excerpt from a three-channel video usually presented as three vertically stacked monitors; filmed in Kabul in 2002 (bottom channel), 2003 (center channel), and 2004 (top channel), finished in 2007. Kabul 2, 3, 4 tracks changes on the surface of the city (as well as the remnants of its past that remain untouched) during the “open moment” (a period full of hopes that would be disappointed) of Kabul’s post-conflict reconstruction. Blind Crossing (2001, 2:30 minutes) uses text from Middle Passages (1992), a book by the Caribbean poet and theorist Kamau Braithwaite, to defamiliarize imagery of the harbor by Chelsea Piers and summon the specters of forced migration. Permanent Transit (2001-02, 24:00 minutes) is a road movie about the state of statelessness filmed through the windows of cars, trains, buses, planes, boats, airports, hotels, and borrowed houses in eleven countries between East and West. Several fragmented narratives about borders, transit, and “no man’s lands” wind through the film, all told or implied by offscreen sound, including a recurring story retold from a comedy sketch by Syrian comedian Duraid Lahham, popular on Lebanese TV during the civil war. In the screening version of this work, the sound of different places mixes and mingles together, creating an uneasy sense of disorientation.

Art of the Real Spotlights: Erika Balsom, “To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary Beyond Docufiction”
Sunday, April 28, 9pm

Part of the Art of the Real Spotlights program at Bar Laika featuring Eric Baudelaire (see above) and Erika Balsom. Erika Balsom’s talk will consider how and why hybridity, fiction, and “blurring boundaries” have figured as recurring preoccupations in critical and curatorial efforts to conceptualize the vitality of experimental documentary practices. Looking to the limits of this discourse, it will explore how some artists and filmmakers have turned to the very different strategies of description and observation, finding in them the possibility of asserting belief in reality at a time of its supposed collapse.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs here, or subscribe to our Bar Laika events mailing list.

Bar Laika is open Wednesday through Sunday nights for drinks, with a seasonal menu prepared by chefs Hsiao Chen and Jessica Russ served 6–10pm and Japanese curry available until close.

Bar Laika is available for private event bookings: cocktail receptions, dinners, book launches, private screenings.