Panel 4
Archival Impulse: Appropriation and Critique

With: Leo Goldsmith (moderator), Greg de Cuir Jr, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Alison Nguyen

How to sustain the critical potential of the recycling and appropriation of the moving-image archive in the digital age? This panel will address artistic re-use of various archives as well as practices of appropriation and sampling of the cinematic past as critique in works by contemporary artists.

“Archival Impulse: Appropriation and Critique” is the fourth of six panels in the online symposium The State of the Moving Image curated by Lukas Brasiskis, taking place this September 17–19 on e-flux Video & Film, and accompanied by the screening program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories (streaming September 6–20).

Leo Goldsmith is Visiting Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. He is a co-author of Robert Stam’s Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (Wiley, 2015), and the author of a book on the British filmmaker Peter Watkins (Verso, forthcoming). He is a frequent contributor to 4Columns, Reverse Shot, and the Brooklyn Rail, whose film section he co-edited from 2011 to 2017. A curator and film programmer, he currently serves as an advisor to the programming team of the New York Film Festival.

Greg de Cuir Jr is an independent curator, writer, and translator who lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are filmmakers and artists who question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema, being documentary or fiction film. The artists are known for their long-term research based on personal or political documents, with particular interests in the traces of the invisible and the absent, and histories kept secret such as the disappearances during the Lebanese Civil War, a forgotten space project from the 1960s, the strange consequences of internet scams and spams, or the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities. Among their works are Circle of Confusion (1997), Lasting Images (2003), The Lebanese Rocket Society (2011), SCAMS (2014), I Stared at Beauty So Much (2016), and Unconformities (2017), showcased at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Their recent feature film Memory Box premiered in the official competition of the 71st Berlin International Film Festival (2021).

Alison Nguyen’s work explores the ways in which images are produced, disseminated, and consumed exposing the conditions from which they arise. Creating strategies for dissent, Nguyen re-articulates mainstream visual language in video, installation, performance, and new media works. She has presented work at e-flux; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Oberhausen International Film Festival; CPH:DOX; CROSSROADS presented by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; True/False; and Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne. She has exhibited her work at numerous institutions and galleries including The International Studio & Curatorial Program, Microscope Gallery, and Hartnett Gallery, New York; AC Gallery, Beijing; the Asia Art Mueum, San Francisco; and the Dowse Art Museum, New Zealand, among others. Nguyen has participated in residencies and has been awarded fellowships from The International Studio & Curatorial Program (2019-2021), the Institute of Electronic Arts (2018), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (2019), and BRIC (2018). She has been awarded grants from NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship – Video/Film ‘21, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYSCA, and The New York Community Trust.

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