John Menick

I’ll be in Paris next week for two screenings of Occupation in the Parisian ‘burbs. The first is in Les Lilas, at Espace Khiasma, on October 11 at 9 PM. Check Espace Khiasma’s Web site for more info and directions.

The second screening will be at Cinéma Le Studio 2 in Aubervilliers on Friday, October 13, 8:30 PM, where we shot one key scene in the project. Eli Lotar’s Aubervilliers will also be screened at Studio 2. A talk with Jack Ralite, Aubervilliers’ longtime mayor, is scheduled to follow.

More info (in French).

Two quick updates on Lebanon and the arts:

MakeFilmsNotWar, launched this year at the Venice Film Festival, is co-sponsoring the 7th Beirut International Film Festival. And for this month’s issue, the editors of Artforum “turned to five individuals involved in [Modern Art Oxford’s “Out of Beirut” exhibition]—Lamia Joreige, Bernard Khoury, Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, and Christine Tohme—and asked them to reflect on the Lebanese crisis and its implications for their practices and for the culture at large.” Some of the results are online.

As it describes itself:

Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.

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.

If you don’t have four hours for Ric Burns, try a thousand words of Cronenberg.

My past three months have been mostly consumed with finishing a new video for a show at the CCA Wattis in San Francisco called The Prophets of Deceit. The group exhibition, opening September 12, is curated by Magali Arriola, and is comprised of work having to do with the apocalypse. (Magali was one of the three curators behind The Backroom, a research-based gallery I participated in a few months ago.) My contribution to the show, a video essay titled The Secret Life of Things, concerns “last person on earth” films, a sci-fi sub-genre in which a person wakes up to find he or she is the last person alive in a given city. These kinds of movies have all sorts of variations, including zombie films, anti-nuclear films, amnesiac films, vampire films, etc. The project comes out of a blog entry I wrote several months ago having to do with René Clair’s 1924 silent short, Paris qui dort, which is probably the first naive prototype for the genre. (I see now that the title says “Part I,” I guess the video is part II. ) Right now I’m finishing up the final picture edit and moving on to mixing the sound. More updates in the next few weeks.

When Artists Say We opens tonight at Artists Space. Looks like a huge show, with lots of friends and former collaborators. I’ll be showing a video or two later in April with Jenny Perlin and Annmarie Jacir.