Currents Program 5: Material Worlds

Q&A with Pablo Marín, Pascal Viveros, Luciana Merino, Jordan Strafer, Zachary Epcar, and Rosalind Nashashibi on Oct. 5 & 6

Vibrant Matter
Pablo Marín, 2024, Argentina/Spain, 7m
U.S. Premiere
A city, at once ancient and modern, emerges from among the brush. As wind works at the leaves, the grass, the microphone, the image is subject to its viewer’s hand, which sets snarls of traffic askew, flips a building like a coin, shakes the trees until they splinter. Pablo Marín sketches a suspension of the laws of physics, his compositions offer an idiosyncratic view of a metropolis in flux.

Towards the Sun, Far from the Center
Pascal Viveros, Luciana Merino, 2024, Chile, 17m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The lens traces the pattern-made world as an omniscient eye falls upon its subjects, following their journey as small dramas emerge. Interest snags on two such figures who move differently than the rest through one airless afternoon in Santiago, solving the maze of urban entanglement as only lovers can.

No Spank
Jordan Strafer, 2024, Greece, 10m
World Premiere
In No Spank, a remote Greek island that doubles as a starched and highly regimented girls’ school serves as the setting of Jordan Strafer’s mordant and ribald coming-of-age story, in which the artist’s trademark mise-en-scène, flair for period minutiae, and tensely taciturn performances evoke the grim frustrations, petty rebellions, and light body horror of adolescence.

Sinking Feeling
Zachary Epcar, 2024, U.S., 21m
World Premiere
In Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance. 

The Invisible Worm
Rosalind Nashashibi, 2024, U.K., 17m
World Premiere
Benjamin Britten’s elegiac musical setting of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” supplies the title of Rosalind Nashashibi’s video, which unfolds as an elliptical cross-media dialogue between the multimedia artist Elena Narbutaitė, the sculptures of Marie Lund, and Nashashibi’s own paintings and camera. What emerges is a set of funny and deep reflections on artist-types and the contexts and meanings of art-making—as a place to breathe and wonder, or a form of wasting time. “Don’t take it all too seriously.”