October 20–November 2, 2022
e-flux Video & Film is very pleased to present Mind Takeover, the third chapter of the six-part Takeover program curated by Julian Ross.
Mind Takeover explores the blurry boundary between obsession and spiritual possession. When another person overwhelms your thoughts, it can feel like they have taken over your mind.
Featuring Hsu Che-yu’s Rabbit 314; Sriwhana Spong’s a hook but no fish; The Nest Collective’s To Catch a Dream; Mako Idemitsu’s Hideo, It’s Me, Mama; and Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell’s Communicating Vessels, streaming for two weeks from October 20–November 2, 2022.
Watch the films here.
Takeover
III. Mind Takeover
Thursday, October 20–Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Hsu Che-yu, Rabbit 314
2020, 7 minutes
With a rabbit’s dead body in hand, a glove puppetry performer reenacts the movements of rabbits as imagined by humans. The project was initiated by the death of a laboratory rabbit, and was inspired by the artist’s family memories. The artist’s grandma served in an animal laboratory for thirty years, during which, due to the particularity of her job, she had to dissect living animals for observation and experiments.
Sriwhana Spong, a hook but no fish
2017-2018, 25 minutes
a hook but no fish explores the lingua ignota (unknown language) received by the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The film begins at Disibodenberg in Germany, the site of the monastery where the child Von Bingen was given as a tithe and interned with two other women. The film moves from Hildegard’s place of internment, where she first began to write, to the desktop of an unknown narrator, to the living room of a flat, to a farmhouse, to scenes of birds swarming and roaming through streets in London and Rotterdam. This vertiginous time-travel is accompanied by a score composed by Aotearoa musician Frances Duncan. a hook but no fish speculates whether the lingua ignota is a prophetic language for an arid time such as our own, where rivers run dry, mammals no longer exist, and only technology and tools survive, and asks what Von Bingen’s act of renaming things with a green-sampling word might bring about.
The Nest Collective, To Catch a Dream
2015, 14 minutes
A grieving widow is desperate to stop her recurring nightmares. In an effort to end them once and for all, she explores a forgotten fairy-tale remedy which leads her to unexpected discoveries.
Mako Idemitsu, Hideo, It’s Me, Mama
1983, 26 minutes
Hideo, It’s Me, Mama is a psychological melodrama that introduces narrative and structural devices that are integral to Idemitsu’s work. Exploring the flawed universe of the contemporary Japanese family, she focuses on a woman’s identity as mother through mother-child and husband-wife relationships. Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. In a cogent metaphor for familial relations in the media-saturated culture of contemporary Japan, Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen. Idemitsu’s poignant irony is embodied in the scene in which Mama, blind to her husband’s needs, caresses Hideo’s video image.
Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell, Communicating Vessels
2020, 32 minutes
An art professor tells the peculiar story of her student E., a strange young woman whose conceptual performance pieces and singular existence leave the professor increasingly adrift. Following the premise that water will always find its level, the term “communicating vessels” describes the way liquid moves between conjoined containers: Gravity and pressure conspire to keep the surfaces aligned, pulling the shared liquid back and forth until the separate vessels come into balance. Like the relationship between a teacher and a student, a mother and a child, or fluid passed from mouth to mouth, meaning, intention, and understanding constantly flow back and forth between us. It is the fundamental connectedness of all things, how ideas migrate and shapes shift, and the possibility of individuation without individualism. Bringing together fictional narrative, personal anecdote, and private conversation, Communicating Vessels explores how we influence each other in ways that are sometimes good, sometimes bad, yet always urgent and necessary.
About the program
Takeover explores the experience of letting another being—their voice, or their mind—into our own. Would we become them, or would they become us? The act of letting someone in, or of being the recipient of a possession, can involve a loss of self. But it can also be a trigger for learning, sharing, or becoming. Watching a film can operate in a similar way. In Sherlock Jr. (1924), Buster Keaton leaps into the cinema screen and enters the onscreen world. Or is it that the onscreen world has entered him? After all, we are in Keaton’s dream, which he has after falling asleep while operating the cinema’s film projector. Film can engulf us and haunt us. In questioning the limitation of understanding film experience as simply reception, Francesco Casetti suggests: “A spectator does not find herself “receiving” a film: she finds herself ‘living’ it.” (2011) Even after the screening is over and we leave the cinema, the film continues to live within us. As film viewers, we are not just a screen but also a projector, taking the film with us into the world.
Curated by Julian Ross, Takeover will unfold in six chapters, each streaming for two weeks on e-flux Video & Film between September 22 and December 15, 2022.
With films and videos by Ephraim Asili, Kurdwin Ayub, Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell, Simon Fujiwara, Dora García, Gary Hill, Su-Chen Hung, Hsu Che-yu, Mako Idemitsu, Myriam Jacob-Allard, Jesse McLean, Jonna Kina, Meiro Koizumi, Natsuka Kusano, Toshio Matsumoto, The Nest Collective, Agnieszka Polska, Riar Rizaldi, Manuel Saiz, Shireen Seno, Tiffany Sia, Ghita Skali, Lisa Spilliaert, Sriwhana Spong, Pilvi Takala, Isabelle Tollenaere, Joseph Wilson.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.