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Abigail Child:
Films and a Lecture

To foreground margins, of form and content, what we usually don’t examine, to speculate around the body as culture, to derange its narratives. My desire: to explode our preconceived notions. Form is intrinsic to this explosion. Then, how to remain human(e) within the reordering, how to touch the world we live in, how to be in and outside, how to pierce everyday so each moment is sacred, laughable, lasts. I use strategies – of asymptotic convergence, vertical montage, a-harmonic weave, digital archive, language mis-translation, sonata look-a-likes, sound and noise juxtapositions – jolly and foreboding. In a world cluttered with information and things, it is important to go below and behind, to unmake sense, to re-contextualize the given and refresh, to upset powers that restrain us. The desire – a maneuverability – fragmented, prismatic, fleeting.
We all get to watch
The whole thing a pretext at the heart of reason, which is why it’s so opaque. That excavates the possibility of a sideways motion. What is it in the broken I’m holding on to?
As if history is accountable
People try to appear in these scenes. They jump to be seen in. An anti-naturalization matrix: incompatible absolutely, untimely. You work by subtraction, draw all opposing forces.
Immigration umbrella with no capstan.

Current and upcoming film series

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Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

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The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

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Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

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Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

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Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait