Lightship 103: works by Anna Kipervaser and Alex Cunningham
Friday, July 15, 2016
8pm
GrayDUCK Gallery
2213 E Cesar Chavez St, Austin, TX 78702 (map)
Admission: $7 general, $5 students
Experimental Response Cinema is pleased to present Lightship 103, an in-person screening of experimental videos and 16mm films by Anna Kipervaser and Alex Cunningham. The program includes Kipervaser’s The Order of Revelation, a 16mm silent film “translating the Quran from Arabic to Visual, in the order in which it was revealed rather than the order in which it was canonized.” (An excerpt is available here: https://vimeo.com/151280684 pass: wind)
Kipervaser and Cunningham each explore intersections between abstraction and translation, structure and poetry, internal and external realities, between what is and what is understood.
Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born multimedia artist. Her work spans multiple disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and HD video, the focus of which is grounded in mythology, translation.
Alex Cunningham is an experimental and documentary filmmaker currently based in North Carolina.
Program:
“The air turns a different color, blindingly bright, deafeningly silent. The source: a hollow sun which inscribes the entire landscape, the same landscape we stand on and look down, out, and up from. Auratic thickets thick with bracken and brier are actively peeled away for the reveal. A history of life. Their story of disturbances in the once-set inscriptions.”
The Order of Revelation: 1-5
Anna Kipervaser (16mm, 14min)
Arabic to Visual, in the order in which it was revealed rather than the order in which it was canonized. The film reclaims the Visual as a Language and challenges prioritization of semantic meaning in translation in favor of considerations such as form fidelity. The structure expands with each chapter, accounting for the development of language while adhering to the rules of the recitation of the Quran. THE ORDER OF REVELATION, 1-5 is a translation of the first 5 chapters of the 114 that make up the Quran.
Zeniths and Nadirs: the oscillations of beginning, and so always.
Alex Cunningham (16mm, 8min)
An attempted and failed documentary of the birth story of earth and an imbalanced human psychology.
Theia
Alex Cunningham (Digital, 9min)
For Theia, and her moon ghost.
Hortus Conclusus
Anna Kipervaser (Digital, 6min)
From the “Song of Songs”: A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.
Raining Ragas nos. 1-6
Alex Cunningham (16mm, 18min)
Inspired by the structured yet highly improvisational style of the Indian raga, these six rolls of 16mm film, shot and edited in-camera, perform the filmic plea of a musical raining raga in hopes of inducing the monsoon. Shot in Kerala and West Bengal during the weak and delayed onset of the 2015 South Asian monsoon, Raining Ragas Nos. 1-6 reveal the anticipation, frustration, and confusion in awaiting the unpredictable weather system.
Suhail and The One Having Crossed Over
Anna Kipervaser (Digital, 6min)
Before he was known as Canopus, he was called Suhail. And before that his name was Osiris. In all documented cases, he had two sisters, one of whom was left behind. She always signals the coming of an other, bigger than she. Their legend lives on to this day; each night the two sisters mourn him – and their separation – across the great heavenly river.
He Begins, She Returns
Anna Kipervaser (Digital, 2min)
It all ends in tears. And then.
Borderlove
Alex Cunningham (16mm, 18min)
A dissonant tale of ethnography and love, handmade by an alien colonist.
TRT: 79 minutes