We are very pleased to welcome back to the gallery filmmaker and curator Devon Narine-Singh, this time for a curated screening program of films by MM Serra and Stephen Broomer.
Narine-Singh writes:
“This program will pair together filmmakers MM Serra and Stephen Broomer’s work to create a dialogue regarding notions of the body, that focus less on its ephemeral qualities, and more on the spiritual and emotional reactions. Also to be consider is the idea of the archive: What does it mean when a work such as Broomer’s is both a sequel, tribute and remembrance to a passed filmmaker? Could an archive be a single work, a work to be discovered within a production as theorized by Hannah Frank? Serra’s Real to Reel Mama is an archive on a family’s history. This question will also be tied to Serra and Broomer’s own work as archivists connecting links between Archives of Emotion and films of celluloid bodies that focus on its psychic nature.”
A Q&A will follow the screening. Narine-Singh and Serra will be in attendance, Broomer will join the conversation via Skype.
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Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker and writer from Toronto, Canada. His work has screened at the Anthology Film Archives, the Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (Harvard University). He is the author of Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film (CFMDC, 2017).
Devon Narine-Singh (b.1997) is a filmmaker, curator and scholar based in Long Island and Queens. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School, The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and the upcoming 2019 Wrong Biennale . He has presented screening and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, The Film-Makers Coop, and Maysles Cinema.
MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, educator and the Executive Director of Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, the world’s oldest and largest archive of independent media. Her first five films (NYC, 1985, Nightfall, 1984, Framed, 1984, PPI, 1986, Turner, 1987) were preserved and digitized by Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. Her film Chop Off, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and screened among others at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight Series in 2009. Serra’s film Bitch-Beauty premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2011 in the “Views from the Avant-Garde” section, and her Breathe Deep (2012) was awarded the Directors’ Choice prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. In June 2012, Serra had a retrospective of her film work at Anthology Film Archives, and in 2013 she was a recipient of the Kathy Acker Award for Lifetime Achievement of Excellence in Avant-Garde Art. She teaches in the Media Studies program at the New School for Social Research on topics such as horror films, sex and gender (until 2016) as well as Avant-garde and Moving Image. Serra lives and works in New York.
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2019 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).