Past
This offering is a sci-fi-inspired multi-sensory stim, a personal reflection on the ways our sensitive systems intertwine with surroundings—how they collapse time, reorganize, spin out, and regulate. Apogee is climax at a distance.
Learn moreIn Raja Feather Kelly’s HYSTERIA, Kelly continues his study of pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity. Picking up where his 2018 performance UGLY left off, Kelly re-situates himself as a glamorous, extraterrestrial entity—both alien to the world and wholly consuming its pop-cultural byproducts. HYSTERIA marks the collapse of fiction into fact, tracking the subsequent inner turmoil, confusion, and mania that Kelly sets out to exorcise.
Learn moreRich Kids is a play about entitlement and consumption, and how digital technology is complicit in social apartheid and gentrification.
Learn moreInside layers of oppressive weather, words fall over a city, making control concrete. An adolescent shield absorbs, distorts, purges in the night, becomes a reservoir for a death dance. Made by Hong Kong raised sister/brother artists Jennie MaryTai Liu and Simon Liu with sound by Portland raised artist Andrew Gilbert, Conviction is a video installation containing two films, force and Sistern, shot in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2021 respectively.
Learn moreIt is with joy and gratitude that we announce the launch of a new season of programming for Knowledge of Wounds 2021-22, and with it, the kindling of our evolving digital container, www.knowledge of wounds.com. In observance of the 2021 Solstice, we extend an invitation to join us by this virtual fireside for the unveiling of the full KoW 2021-22 program, a series of Indigenous-led events which will continue to unfold in this space over the course of an entire celestial year.
Learn moreAgainst the Current is a processional audiovisual journey along the Willamette River teaming Mobile Projection Unit with three performers and two roving “guides” with “lanterns”.
Learn moreThin Skin is a true story about keeping it together when you're falling apart.
Learn moreA DISCURSIVE PROGRAM OF FILM & VIDEO
Learn moreAmerican Chameleon: The Living Installments is a hybrid multimedia living artwork, instigated by Nigerian-American artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, that explores the ever-evolving ways in which digitality intersects with the fugitive realities and shapeshifting principles that Black queer people employ to survive and heal.
Learn moreAki Onda Stack Until It Falls Down
Learn moreMemento Stella is an original phrase I coined to remind me to "remember the stars" and "never forget that we too reside among the stars", as well as the title of a project I started from winter of 2016. Screening of Memento Stella, with original soundtrack by Reinier van Houdt, Sept. 14 and screening of Memento Stella, with live music of Takashi Makino, Sept. 15.
Learn morePartner Program Co-presented with Northwest Film Center and JUDY SHAKEDOWN is the story of Los Angeles’ black lesbian strip club scene and its genesis. Owned and operated by women, underground and illegal in nature, the club Shakedown is the darker, faster, younger iteration of this dance culture. The film is a window into this world. Shakedown emerged from a post-RIOTS, post-OJ, post-integration but still very racially divided Los Angeles. In this divided city Shakedown is an independent, all black and all female cash economy. SHAKEDOWN chronicles the explicit performances and personal relationships of the party’s dancers and organizers including Ronnie-Ron, Shakedown Productions’ creator and emcee; Mahogany, the legendary “mother” of the community; Egypt, their star performer; and Jazmine, the “Queen” of Shakedown.
Learn moreEiko Otake presents a screening of a specially edited version of A Body in Fukushima a film created by the artist to be shown either with or without a photo exhibition and/or Eiko's live performance.
Learn moreHolocene presents Fin de Cinema, a new live score of Marcel Camus’ 1959 film Black Orpheus, composed and performed by local musicians. “Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.” - Criterion
Learn moreunearth mines histories of desire and loss, recasting the black box theater as parietal underground.
Learn moreJoin PICA and Outside the Frame for a closing celebration of Abigail DeVille's The American Future, as we co-present a free screening of short films by houseless youth, including the premiere of a new project. A panel discussion with participating youth filmmakers will follow. Light snacks will be served. This event is a public program affiliated with Abigail DeVille's exhibition The American Future, on view at PICA through January 12, 2019.
Learn moreBIGHT OF THE TWIN tells the story of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Hazel Hill McCarthy III's journey to Ouidah in Benin to explore the origins of the Vodoun (Voodoo) religion.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In the early 19th century, a Colombian named Martina was investigated by the colonial court for being a hermaphrodite, after being accused by her female lover of having an “unnatural body.” Meanwhile, in the Ottoman Empire, a woman named Nour is married off to the brother of her lover after her mother finds the two women together in bed. Part documentary and part fiction, the film presents these parallel stories as an imagined correspondence between the two women, exposing the ways in which medicine, law, religion, and tradition have shaped dominant discourses of the gendered and sexual body. Separated by geography, culture, and religion they both faced the consequences of defying sex and gender norms.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: In the darkness of a cinema space, the audience sits blindfolded. Behind each row of audience members is a row of children who in hushed voices describe a film only they can see. Accompanied by the soundtrack (which has no dialogue), the whispered descriptions are a fragile, fragmentary and at times struggling but courageous attempt by the children to make sense of what they see projected on the screen.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: A Smeary Spot, 2015 is a 53 minute 4-channel video installation drawing on theater and documentary methods to rework the genre of science fiction. The title, A Smeary Spot is a references to the sun borrowed from feminist sci-fi writer Johanna Russ. The sun, a dense concentration of heat and light, is an organizing principle of time, place and ego. What potential emerges when we glance away from the source and settle into the blurry residue of the afterimage? This work re-orients the audience within a speculative present. Shot in two locations: on public lands in the deserts of southern Utah and inside a black box theater, where performers deliver recitations of appropriated and altered texts that compose a loose manifesto on being. Inside this cinematic experience is a surreal narrative of bodies in transition (both movement and definition) that act out, delivering curious combinations of language, materiality and gestures. Among these bodies, the land, the water, the refuse pile and the theater are not simply grounds, resources, waste or stages upon which these actions occur, they are sprawling protagonists, like the sun—permeating and persistent.
Learn moreHYPNOSIS DISPLAY is an original live sound and 16mm film collaboration between experimental vocalist and musician Grouper (Liz Harris) and filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Learn moreNo need to stay fixed to your seat, no need to act as passive viewer, or sit in reverence of the image. Tonight we privilege the soundtrack as a way to suspend the normal functioning of film. In Favor of Skepticism is a re-viewing of materials from the Letterist and Situationist movements in which words will be shifted, translated, and overlayed onto, from, and between language and medium.
Learn moreIn this concert for film, Inuit throat singer and famed tour de force vocalist, Tanya Tagaq reclaims the controversial 1922 silent film Nanook of the North. Tagaq’s innovative vocals and deep sense of Arctic life work to create a powerful soundscape of authentic emotion and pulsing breath against the backdrop of the film’s racially charged clichés. In Nanook, Tagaq’s haunting singing is joined by violinist Jesse Zubot, genius drummer Jean Martin, and Juno Award-winning composer Derek Charke’s original film score to frame the vintage semi-documentary of an Inuk family in a revealing contemporary light.
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