October program

October 18 will mark 365 days of Bar Laika in Clinton Hill. 18,349 drinks, nearly half a ton of rice, 56 screenings, 10 music performances, and 2 boiler repairs later, we’ve decided to stick around.  

We invite you to join us in celebrating on Thursday, October 17 with a screening of Anri Sala’s Dammi i Colori and special one year happy hour specials all night. 

Also this month, an evening with Beatrice Gibson and Projections at the 57th New York Film Festival, e-flux video rental screening programs with Superflex, Judith Barry, and Jozef Robakowski, and with Johanna Billing, Wilson Diaz, and Allora & Calzadilla, and a book launch with Canadian Centre for Architecture.

See you soon : )

Bar Laika and Projections at the 57th New York Film Festival present: an evening with Beatrice Gibson
Wednesday, October 2, 9pm 

Two short films by Beatrice Gibson presented by Dennis Lim and Aily Nash as part of Projections 2019, The New York Film Festival (NYFF)

As a kick-off event for Projections 2019, Beatrice Gibson will screen two short portrait films, one of CA Conrad and one of Eileen Myles, both of whom were subjects of her recent film I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, presented in Projections in 2018. These films are part of a larger project which includes her latest film Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (2019) which will have its US premiere at the festival on October 4 in Shorts Program 3: Signs of Life.

Beatrice Gibson is an artist and filmmaker based in London. In 2019 she had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, London; Bergen Kunstall; and Mercer Union, Toronto. She is twice winner of The Tiger Award for Best Short Film, Rotterdam International Film Festival (2009/13). In 2015 she won the 17th Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel, and more recently was the recipient of the Images Festival Award for Autobiography (2019). Gibson is currently one of six artists shortlisted for the Jarman Award for Artist’ Film and Video. Her latest film premiered at Quinzaine (Director’s Fortnight), Cannes Film Festival 2019.

e-flux video rental at Bar Laika presents: Superflex, Judith Barry, and Józef Robakowski
Thursday, October 10, 2019, 9pm

e-flux video rental (EVR) presents three videos on shopping and commerce:

Superflex, Guaraná Power Commercials, 11:16 minutes, 2004
In 2004, a series of five commercials were made together with the guaraná farmers behind the Guaraná Power soft drink. Each of the commercials contains a narrative about the product told by the farmers themselves. In 2003, SUPERFLEX initiated a collaboration with a guaraná farmers’ cooperative from Maués in the Brazilian Amazon in order to produce the Guaraná Power soft drink. The farmers have organised themselves in response to the activities of the multinational corporations XxXxx and XxxxxXx, a cartel whose monopoly on purchase of the raw material has driven the price paid for guaraná seeds down by 80% while the cost of their products to the consumer has risen.

Judith Barry, Casual Shopper, 6:11 minutes, 1981
Casual Shopper was inspired by three things: the realization that there could be a female “flaneuse” après Walter Benjamin’s flaneur; that a woman’s “gaze” could produce narrative thus countering Laura Mulvey’s famous observation about classic HW film —- that men “act” and women (only) “appear”; that visual pleasure could proceed from a “feminist perspective” within cinematic space (See Judith Barry, “Casual Imagination,” Blasted Allegories, ed. Brian Wallis, MIT press, Cambridge 1987). Casual Shopper is about people who shop casually, those who go to the mall just to browse, at their leisure, when there is nothing better to do. This is a love story that never advances beyond that which can be imagined, which is never consummated, but which returns to a prosaic scene where demands are exchanged and desire circulates endlessly. Share the fantasy.

Józef​ Robakowski, Market, 4:26 minutes, 1970
In Market, the first film Robakowski produced with the Workshop of Film Form, he attempted to expose film’s potential to create an illusion of reality as it was exploited by professional cinema. He showed that the feeling of reality film creates is merely a product of technology and, more precisely, the effect of the standard frame rate in the camera or the projector (24 frames per second). A slight modification of this speed or filming at a different frame rate (say, five frames every two seconds, as is the case in Market), gives an entirely different image of recorded reality.

Bar Laika celebrates one year in Clinton Hill!
Screening of Dammi i Colori by Anri Sala at 9pm
Thursday, October 17, 2019, 9pm

To mark our first anniversary, we will screen Dammi i Colori by Anri Sala, the artist who inaugurated our screening program on our grand opening in 2018.

Anri Sala, Dammi i Colori, 16:00 minutes, 2003, chronicles the work of Sala’s friend and artist Edi Rama as Mayor of Tirana, Albania. Dammi i Colori evokes the city as canvas and champions art as a means for social transformation. Edi Rama became mayor of Tirana in 2000, and lacking resources for immediate infrastructural improvements, went about re-painting the capital’s decaying buildings in brilliant colors and patterns. His aesthetic and political act was a powerful visualization of change—a source of both public debate and renewed civic pride. When asked about their reaction to the project in a political poll, the citizens of Tirana indicated that while they did not like the paintings, they wanted this project to continue… Edi Rama is currently the Prime Minister of Albania for the Socialist Party.

Drink specials all night!!!

Book launch: The Museum Is Not Enough, with Canadian Centre for Architecture
Sunday, October 20, 9pm

The Museum Is Not Enough is the result of collective reflections on architecture, contemporary social concerns, institutions, and the public undertaken by the CCA in recent years. Fueled by the CCA’s continued questioning of the role of cultural institutions and the issues they face today, The Museum Is Not Enough initiates conversations with accomplices who ask themselves similar questions, including Stefano Graziani, Wilfried Kuehn, Kalle Lasn, Maria Lind, Kieran Long, Mike Pepi, Filippo Romano, Bernd Scherer, James Voorhies, and Mark Wigley. It is edited by Giovanna Borasi, Albert Ferré, Francesco Garutti, Jayne Kelley, and Mirko Zardini, and is designed by Jonathan Hares.

e-flux video rental at Bar Laika presents: Johanna Billing, Wilson Diaz, Mixrice, and Allora & Calzadilla
Thursday, October 24, 2019, 9pm

Johanna Billing, You Don’t Love Me Yet, 7:43 minutes, 2003
The “You Don’t Love Me Yet” project, a bittersweet convergence between the individual and the audience, consists of both a film (2003) in which a group of Swedish musicians are coming together to record a cover version of the 1984 ambiguous love song “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” by the Texan singer-songwriter Roky Erickson, in Atlantis studio in Stockholm, and an ongoing live tour (2002–13) in which local musicians in different cities were invited to cover the same song. It has during the tour been covered again and again and repeated in a wide variety of interpretations each reflecting the participants’ own personal style. In this project, the cover version is used as a catalyst to explore ways of maintaining originality and uniqueness of personal as well as artistic integrity both on an individual and collective level. In an archive presentation, the film version of the project as well as the almost 300 live versions are on display.

Wilson Diaz, Los Rebeldes del Sur, 11:00 minutes, 2002
Díaz shows a group of uniformed, armed members of the Marxist-Leninist group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo, or FARC) performing Colombian folk music to an audience of tourists and local residents. The soldiers perform two songs in the Vallenato style, a highly narrative genre that traditionally gave voice to the struggles of Columbia’s rural poor. In Díaz’s work, however, the singers are shown to have replaced the traditional lyrics with their own, singing first about the beauty of the landscape and love, then about the war they are waging against opposing paramilitary forces. By appropriating a form of popular protest song and conflating beauty and violence, the soldiers embody the contradictory nature of human identity and the ambiguity of repression.

Allora & Calzadilla, Returning a Sound, 5:42 minutes, 2004
Vieques is an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used by the US Navy and NATO forces as military testing ground as from the 1940s. Civil disobedience and active protest movements initiated by local inhabitants and an international support network led to the end of the bombings and progressive demilitarization in 2002. Allora & Calzadilla became involved in the defense of this cause in 2000 and made a series of works relating to the story of this island. This video demonstrates the beginning of their ongoing interest in the interplay between militarism and sound. In Returning A Sound, Homar, the motorcycle driver and activist, drives around the island as if reclaiming the territory. The muffler was altered so it no longer silenced the noise and became a musical instrument instead, like a trumpet to announce decontamination and recovery in echo to the terrible exploding sounds that had shaped the lives of the Vieques inhabitants for 60 years.

Mixrice, Mixlanguage, 3:30 minutes, 2004
Mixrice is a project team to research and present new models of art and cultural activities. It was designed to overcome the perspective of foreign migrant workers created by the existing mass media and to expand the scope of art practice to the social and public domain through their daily lives and comments. As the project progresses, migrant workers, activists, and writers are participating in an improvised song.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website; or subscribe to our events mailing lists for e-flux and Bar Laika.

For more information, contact laika [​at​] e-flux.com.