John Menick

From the Web site:

The 2007 New York Arab & South Asian Film Festival (NYASAFF) presents the best in recent features, docs, & shorts that increase awareness of the creative vitality and sociopolitical realities of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas. Given the historical and cultural affinities between these geographic regions, as well as the contemporary political landscape, several cultural and media organizations, including Alwan for the Arts, 3rd i NY, South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, and Downtown Community Television have launched a collaborative series encompassing film, video, music, visual art, and literature, that will culminate in the annual, NYASA Film Festival running from February 23 – March 4, 2007.

Update: More from the Reeler.

I was too late in finding out about the Werner Herzog talk this Friday to get tickets, but in the meantime there’s Tom Bissell’s The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog.

Michael Rakowitz’s The invisible enemy should not exist opens on Friday, January 12, at Lombard-Freid Projects. The show follows up on a few of the Iraq themes Michael started exploring in his project for Creative Time.

This Saturday, “The Nightly News,” a group show, opens at Luxe Gallery. 16 Beaver collaborator Pedro Lasch and Nomads and Residents collaborator Liselot van der Heijden are included. Unfortunately the Luxe Web site is not current, but here is an excerpt from the press release:

“The Nightly News” an exhibition curated by

Kathleen Goncharov and Stephan Stoyanov

LUXE Gallery,

24 W. 57th Street # 505

New York, NY 10019

January 13th – February 10th , 2007

Opening Reception: Saturday January 13th, 2007. 6-8pm.

http://www.luxegallery.net/

Reading by Charles Doria and performance by Pia Lindman. Saturday, February 3. 6 PM.

Artists: Robert Boyd, caraballo-farman, Jody Culkin, Lieven De Boeck, Al Fadhil, Liselot van der Heijden, Dominik Lejman, Ahmet Ogut, Pedro Lasch, Pia Lindman, Christodoulous Paniyatou, Jackie Salloum, Lydia Venieri, Michael Waugh, Fred Wilson, Michael Zansky, and others.

The Nightly News is an exhibition of works by artists from around the world, some showing in New York for the first time. These artists were born in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, Poland, Mexico and Finland, as well as the United States. Current events and issues such terrorism, war, surveillance, xenophobia, racism, religious fanaticism, immigration, nationalism, and the abuse of power drive the exhibition.

Via DVblog.

The Voice and indieWIRE have reviews for the Film Forum screenings. Complete photos by tofz4u.

Next Monday, 16 Beaver is hosting an event dedicated to the memory of Danièle Huillet. As part of the event’s announcement, they’ve included a short, moving email from Jean-Pierre Gorin. Texts on and by Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa, and Serge Daney are also excerpted.

The organizers link to the filmmakers’ recent 12 minute short film, EUROPA 2005 (2006):

…shot last spring and, though it may be shown as an anonymous cine-tract, it will screen along with 4 of their Italian films at the Villa Medici on October 21st. The film was commisioned by Enrico Ghezzi as a “sequel” to Rossellini’s EUROPA ’51 and the “27 OCTOBRE” of the title refers to the day two teenagers (Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17) were electrocuted and killed while hiding from the police in an electric station – the event that sparked the uprising in France last year. Huillet, Straub and two other filmmakers shot the film on digital video (their first) on the site of the teen deaths, in the suburb Clichy-sous-Bois.

The video follows:

The Disappearance is part of the traveling group exhibition In the poem about love you don’t write the word love opening on Thursday November 16, 6-8PM at Artists Space. The exhibition is curated by Tanya Leighton. From the press release:

In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love takes the distinction that French critic Serge Daney made between the “image” and the “visual” as a starting point for a selection of works in this two-part exhibition. Daney’s distinction refers to an “image” that can critically challenge and destabilize predominant models of information, resisting the “purely technical,” that which is nothing other than the verification that something functions. Through various strategies of dislocation or slippage, these works stage an unsettling tension that challenges visual conventions in an increasingly mediated culture.

Artists include:

Artists: Ayreen Anastas, Marcel Broodthaers, François Bucher, Matthew Buckingham, Bruce Conner, Bernadette Corporation, Jeremy Deller, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Sharon Hayes, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Emily Jacir, Gareth James, Alexander Kluge, Phillip Lai, David Lamelas, Simon Martin, John Menick, Avi Mograbi, Lucas Ospina, Giulio Paolini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mai-Thu Perret, Walid Raad, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Marc Robinson, Keith Sanborn, Allan Sekula, John Smith, Sue Tompkins, Andy Warhol

The exhibition is followed by a great film program at Anthology this winter. Here is the full line-up:

Film Program
Mondays from January 8 through February 12 at Anthology Film Archives located at 32 Second Avenue (at Second Street)
For showtimes, please visit our website, www.artistsspace.org or visit www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Program 1
Bruce Conner Report (1963-1967) 13 min.
Alexander Kluge The Blind Director (1986) 113 min.

Program 2
Andy Warhol Outer and Inner Space (1965) 33 min.
Pier Paolo Pasolini Notes For An African Orestes (1968/69) 75 min.
François Bucher Television (an address)—Ernesto Samper Addresses Washington, January 20th. Inauguration Day (2005) 20 min.

Program 3
Marcel Broodthaers La Pipe (Magritte) (1969) 3 min.
Marcel Broodthaers Ceci ne serait pas une pipe (Un Film du Musée d’Art Moderne) (This wouldn’t be a pipe) (1969-71) 2 min. 20 sec.
Marcel Broodthaers La Pipe (Gestalt, Abbildung, Figur, Bild) (1969-71) 4 min. 20 sec.
Ayreen Anastas Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2003) 60 min.

Program 4
Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica Videograms of a Revolution (1992) 106 min.
Matthew Buckingham Situation Leading to a Story (1999) 21 min.
Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis Battle of Orgreave (2001) 60 min.

Program 5
David Lamelas The Invention of Dr. Morel (2000) 23 min.
Phillip Lai His Divine Grace (2000) DVD 25 min.
Bernadette Corporation Get Rid of Yourself (2002) 60 min.
Program 6
Avi Mograbi How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997) 61 min.
Walid Raad Hostage—The Bachar Tapes (2001) 16 min.

The Who Cares book launches this Friday at 5pm at the NY Art Book Fair. The whole fair looks interesting with Walid Raad, John Lurie, Silvia Kolbowski and others presenting new publications.

Last year, Creative Time invited me to be part of a series of discussions on the topic of politics in contemporary art. The series, organized by Doug Ashford, included a lot of great people, and now the edited transcripts of those talks are about to be published. Four related projects by artists are also due to open soon.

In the fall of 2002, Emily Jacir asked me to help her organize a video festival in Palestine. As I remember, Emily had sent out an email to a group of artist friends requesting they send videos to show in a class she was teaching at Birzeit University that winter. Evidently, she meant the request to be private, but that wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere in the email, and many of the people began forwarding it on. The emails spread quickly, and weeks later she was inundated with videos.

I watched and helped select many of the videos with Emily, at first just because I was around, and then as a co-organizer. A video festival grew out of those initial subissions. Actually, Emily did most of the hard work in Palestine, and I mostly managed the New York end. The response to the project was quite good, and despite the fact that there was almost no press on the fest outside of Palestine, I get occasional emails about the project. There have been several film and video festivals since, but none focusing on videos art or experimental cinema.

The old domain for the festival’s Web site expired (impossible to renew since it was gobbled up by some porn company) and the only records of the festival left were the local PHP files I had backed up in an ancient computer in my apartment. At Emily’s request I dug them out and will keep them archived here until we find a better place for them.