If I Had a Hammer Film Program
Tuesday, October 25 | 7:30PM
Aurora Picture Show
2442 Bartlett St, Houston, TX 77098
Curated and organized by Houston-based independent film curator Michael Robinson, this program includes video and short films by artists and filmmakers whose works examine disparate global social, cultural, and political issues and movements, offering an expanded view of the themes explored in the FotoFest Biennial central exhibition, If I Had a Hammer. The night will feature films by Majid Al-Remaihi, Razan AlSalah, Robert Beck, Ulysses Jenkins, Darol Olu Kae, Dana Plays, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Cauleen Smith.
This film screening is held in conjunction with the FotoFest Biennial 2022 central exhibition, If I Had a Hammer, which examines the ways artists utilize images to unpack the ideological underpinnings that inspire collective cultural movements around the globe. If I Had a Hammer is on view at Silver Street Studios and Winter Street Studios between September 24–November 6. A second film program featuring a screening of Al Santana’s 1985 film Voices of the Gods, will take place on November 11 at The Menil Collection.
This program is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Registration is encouraged and seating is first come, first serve.
Schedule of Films:
Dana Plays, Across the Border, 1982
16mm film, 8 minutes. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
In Across the Border, filmmaker Dana Plays expresses her lifelong commitment to the culture of Latin America. More specifically, her film offers the viewer an unusual insight into the complex relationship between the people of El Salvador and the United States government. Completed in 1982, during a period in which many American artists were trying to convey their anger with their own country’s politics. Across the Border transcends the conventions of social documentary as we have come to know it through public television.
Robert Beck, The Feeling of Power, 1990
Digital video, 9 minutes. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix.
The Feeling of Power documents a 1989 ACT-UP protest at Trump Tower, offering a self-reflexive manifesto of video activism that brings the ‘70s “guerrilla television” movement into the age of the camcorder.
Ulysses Jenkins, Mass of Images, 1978
Digital video, 4 minutes. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix.
From behind a pyramid of TV monitors, perhaps calling to mind the TVs stacked for destruction in Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1975), Jenkins slowly rises, garbed in protective eye goggles and an American flag scarf. He begins to intone a haunting refrain: “You’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know, from years and years of TV shows...,” echoing the agitprop of the 1970s guerrilla television
movement, which sought to tune people into their manipulation by commercial television.
Cauleen Smith, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron), 1992
16mm film, 6 minutes. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Male and female voice-overs clash in telling the biographical story of an artist: one speaks in a monotone through media-defined stereotypes, while the other speaks in a playful, defiantly personal, way. The film returns to the same cycle of images and scrolling texts to reveal that a person’s story can depend on who is telling it.
Jacolby Satterwhite, Blessed Avenue, 2018
Digital video, 19 minutes. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix.
Blessed Avenue is a tribute to the artist’s late mother. Songs she recorded on cassette tape and her drawings for a fantasy QVC line of domestic products are catalysts for a clubby, S&M-themed Hieronymus Bosch-inspired music video performed by Satterwhite, Juliana Huxtable, Lourdes Leon Ciccone and DeSe Escobar, among other downtown luminaries.
Razan AlSalah, Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba, 2017
Digital video, 7 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
This doc-fiction is a (re)construction, a (re)collection of the memory of returning to Haifa. It is an imaginary memory of retuning to Haifa. Razan AlSalah is imagining her grandmother was able to return to Haifa when she was still alive, through Google Streetview, which is the only way she could see Palestine.
Darol Olu Kae, i ran from it and was still in it, 2020
Digital video, 11 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist.
A poetic meditation on familial loss and separation, and the love that endures against dispersion. Kae repurposes materials sourced online and pairs them with images from his personal archive in an effort to wade through the deep emotions surrounding his father’s death and the sudden relocation of his children, collapsing time and memory in the process.
Majid Al-Remaihi, And Then They Burned the Sea, 2021
Digital video, 12 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist.
And Then They Burn the Sea is an elegiac contemplation on familial memory and loss. Filmmaker Majid Al- Remaihi ruminates on the experience of witnessing his mother’s gradual and terminal memory loss over the course of many years. Weaving a personal family archive, reenacted dreams and rituals, the film underlines the promise of cinema as a medium for memories even at their most irretrievable.
ABOUT CURATOR MICHAEL ROBINSON
Michael Robinson is a freelance film programmer and the co-founder of The Big Queer Picture Show, a nomadic monthly queer film series in Houston, where he programs new and repertory short and feature-length films. He has served on festival and panel juries for Austin Film Society, CineFestival, and HAAPI Film Festival, among others. He previously worked as the Associate Creative Director at Houston Cinema Arts Society (HCAS) from 2018 to 2022, Co-Artistic Director and Shorts Programmer for Houston’s International LGBTQ+ Film Festival QFest from 2017-2021, and Education Coordinator at Society for the Performing Arts from 2017-2018. He currently works as the Marketing and Communications Manager at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) and as the programmer for the Borders | No Borders regional short film competition for Houston Cinema Arts Festival. He received his BA in Anthropology and Film at Rice University.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Majid Al-Remaihi is a filmmaker and film programmer from Doha, Qatar. His short film And Then They Burn the Sea premiered at Locarno in 2021. He produced it under the mentorship of Academy Award-nominated director Rithy Panh and with the support of the Qatari Film Fund. Currently, he is developing his next short film. Majid is also part of the Film Programming team at the Doha Film Institute.
Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds. Her work has shown at community-based and international film festivals and galleries including Art of the Real, Prismatic Ground, RIDM, HotDocs, Yebisu, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Sharjah Film Forum, IZK Institute for Contemporary Art and Sursock Museum. AlSalah co-directs the Feminist Media Studio with Krista Lynes and teaches film and media arts at the Communication Studies department at Concordia University.
Robert Buck, formerly Robert Beck, was born in 1959, in Towson, Maryland. He graduated with a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Film and Television Department in 1982, and the Independent Study Program (ISP), Studio Program, of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Cranford Collection, London; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Stonescape, Napa Valley, California; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio; Matisse Museum, Nice, France; Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.v., Berlin, Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany; and Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland. Buck was a 1999 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award recipient. In 2016-17 his work was on view on the Whitney Museum’s Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection. Since 2009, Buck has been a participant in the Lacanian Compass New York, where, in collaboration with Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff, he organizes Culture & Psychoanalysis, an ongoing series of seminars devoted to contemporary art and culture. Robert Buck lives and works in New York City and Far West Texas.
Ulysses Jenkins was born in 1946, in Los Angeles, California. He studied painting and drawing as an undergraduate at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and later received an MFA in intermedia-video and performance art from Otis Art Institute (now known as Otis College of Art and Design). Prior to enrolling at Otis, from 1970-72 Jenkins worked with the Los Angeles County Probation Department, teaching art to nondelinquent youth, and in 1989, taught video through a gang-intervention program in Oakland. Jenkins is the recipient of numerous awards, including individual artist fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, and named first place in experimental video by the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1990 and 92. His work has been included in major exhibitions, including America is Hard to See (2015), at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Now Dig this!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (2012), at the Hammer Museum, and California Video (2008) at the Getty Center. Jenkins is currently Associate Professor in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and an affiliate professor in the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine.
Darol Olu Kae is an artist and filmmaker from and based in Los Angeles. Kae’s artistic practice disrupts conventional narrative structures of storytelling through its dynamic treatment of sound and image. His collaborative, research-based approach to art and filmmaking grounds itself in the precarious, yet generative power of the black experience in America.
Kae has collaborated with visionary filmmakers such as Kahlil Joseph and A.G. Rojas. And his own film work has screened at festivals and institutions worldwide including BlackStar Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, MoCA Los Angeles, and Sundance Film Festival. He was awarded the Pardino d’oro for Best International Short Film in 2020 at the Locarno Film Festival for his film i ran from it and was still in it. In 2021, i ran from it… earned Special Jury Recognition for Poetry at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival. Kae is currently in pre-production for his next short-form project, Keeping Time, and developing his feature directorial debut, Without a Song.
Dana Plays’ films have exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Cinematheque at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the Pacific Film Archive at the University Art Museum; Filmforum at Lace and the Egyptian Theater; Millennium Film Workshop; Seattle International Film Festival; Montreal Nouveau Film Festival; Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, and more. Her films have garnered numerous film festival awards including Juror’s Choice Award at the Black Maria Film Festival, for Nuclear Family; Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Zero Hour; Best Documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival for Love Stories My Grandmother Tells; and Best Experimental Film at the Houston International Film Festival for Across the Border, among others.
Jacolby Satterwhite is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality and fantasy through immersive installation, virtual reality and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action film of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as the stage on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice, namely illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography and writing. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of references, guided by queer theory, modernism and video game language to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens. An equally significant influence is that of his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, whose ethereal vocals and diagrams for visionary household products serve as the source material within a decidedly complex structure of memory and mythology.
Satterwhite received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Satterwhite’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally, including most recently at the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2022); Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, PA (2021); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2021); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2021). He was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Studio Museum of Harlem, Houston Contemporary Art Museum; Yerba Buena Center for Art, and the New Museum, New York, D21 Leipzig and Decad, Berlin. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Threewalls, Chicago. She shows her drawings and 2D work with Corbett vs. Dempsey. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film/Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is based in the great city of Chicago and serves as faculty for the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program.
FotoFest Biennial 2022 Media Sponsor:
Image: Razan AlSalah, A deep well, where your father was born, from Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba, 2017. Courtesy of the filmmaker. [بئر عميق، خلق في ابوكي.“ من فيلم "أبوكي خلق عمره ١٠٠ سنة، زي النكبة" ل رزان الصلح.]
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