Staying with the Troubled Real: Before and After Post-Truth

Join us on e-flux Video & Film on Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 1pm EST for the online discussion “Staying with the Troubled Real: Before and After Post-Truth.”

Ruminating on the divisions between true and fake in relation to technological, political, and societal realities, the scholar and programmer Tess Takahashi and moving-image artists Eric Baudelaire, David Blandy, Sara Magenheimer, and Alison Nguyen will discuss videos and films screened as part of the series True Fake: Artists’ Films Troubling the Real. Changes of traditional forms of representation and definitions of false and true in a world in which digital technologies have reshaped the experience of the real; new forms of power in a networked society; limits and potentials of the contemporary public sphere; and strategies for moving-image artists to navigate between documentation and fiction are among the topics to be addressed in the discussion moderated by Lukas Brasiskis. The discussion will be livestreamed on e-flux Video and Film, with audience Q&A available via chat.

“Staying with the Troubled Real: Before and After Post-Truth” is presented as part of the series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film, currently screening the films in Part Five | Faux Documentary and Complex Reality. A repeat screening of all the films in the series from programs one through five will take place on Tuesday, April 20, 2021. Watch the film here.

French-American artist Eric Baudelaire has developed an oeuvre primarily composed of film, photography, silkscreen prints, performance, publications, and installations. In his research-based practice, Baudelaire examines the relationship between images, past events, and their documentation. Interested in the role of the cinematographic image as an index marker, Baudelaire creates narratives in which recorded facts serve as a starting point for an exploration of the unknown. In examining the changes in human behavior through interrogating the political structures that govern global, national, and micro-communities, Baudelaire’s practice could be read through a bio-political perspective. Navigating the experience of urban living; the global, technical, and economic dependencies of war; movement and the contemporary paradigm of geographical proximity and distance, his works evoke a hauntingly provocative perspective on the current political climate.

David Blandy has established his terrain through a series of investigations into cultural forces that inform and influence him. They range from his love of hip-hop and soul, to computer games and manga. With works that range from performance to video, reality to construct, Blandy uses references sampled from wide and disparate sources that inform his (and our own) individualist sense of self. His work has been shown at numerous institutions including Tate, London; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; INIVA, London; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Spike Island, Bristol; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Serpentine Gallery, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Modern Art Oxford; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. He is also one half of a collaborative practise with Larry Achiampong. Their recent work focuses on the writing of Frantz Fanon, and on race and identity in an age of avatars, video games, and DNA ancestry testing.

Lukas Brasiskis is a film and media researcher and curator, currently a PhD candidate at New York University in the Department of Cinema Studies, and an adjunct professor at NYU and CUNY/Brooklyn College. His interests include eco-media, the politics and aesthetics of the world cinema, and intersections between moving-image cultures and the contemporary art world. Brasiskis’ texts have been published in both academic and non-academic media, and he has curated a number of screening programs, Including From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures (with Inga Lace, Post MoMa, New York), Environmental Memories in East-Central European Art (Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade), Landscape to be Experienced and to be Read: Time, Ecology, Politics on the work of filmmaker James Benning (CAC, Vilnius), Mermaid with The Movie Camera (Spectacle Theater, New York), a program of experimental films Human, Material, Machine (with Leo Goldsmith, CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania), Baltic Poetic Documentary as Ethnographic Cinema (NYU, New York), Welcome to the Anthropocene (CCAMP, Lithuania), and a retrospective of the films of Nathaniel Dorsky (CAC, Vilnius) among others.

Sara Magenheimer has widely exhibited, performed, and screened her work. Recent exhibitions include White Columns, Foxy Production, Document, Chapter NY, Interstate Projects, 247365, and Cleopatra’s. From 2004–10 Magenheimer performed in bands, touring extensively and releasing five records. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant and a 2015 Artadia Grant, and winner of the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Recent exhibitions include Art In General’s New Commission in Riga, Latvia and a solo exhibition at The Kitchen in New York.

Alison Nguyen is a New York-based visual artist working primarily in film. Her work explores the ways in which images are produced, disseminated, and consumed within the current media landscape, exposing the socio-political conditions from which they arise. Creating strategies for dissent, she re-articulates mainstream visual language in video, installation, and new media works. She has been awarded grants from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYSCA and The New York Community Trust. In 2018, Nguyen was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

Tess Takahashi is a Toronto-based scholar, writer, and programmer whose work focuses on the politics of experimental moving-image arts. She is currently working on two book projects, On Magnitude, which considers artists’ work in relation to the enormous scale of big data, and Impure Film (1968–2008), which connects the fields of documentary and art. She is a member of the editorial collective for Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media. Takahashi’s writing has been published there as well as in Cinema Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Animation, MIRAGE, and Cinema Scope among others.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.