Landscape Variations | 60 minutes | 8:00pm, Thursday 21 March at the Institute of Modern Art
Following a talk from Professor Sue Best, curator of the IMA’s current Ana Mendieta: Connecting to the Earth exhibition, we’re holding a free screening of Landscape Variations, a series of shorts connected to Ana Mendieta or evocative of her bodied interest in the land.
Ana Mendieta, Nature Inside | Raquel Cecilia | 2015, 8 minutes
Artist, Ana Mendieta, narrates as corresponding images of her work in both still and moving images highlight her themes and meanings behind her work.
Courtesy of Raquel Cecilia
025 Sunset Red | Laida Lertxundi | 2016, 14 minutes 025 Sunset Red is a kind of quasi-autobiographical reckoning. An indiscernibility of then and now. Recollection and immediacy. The Basque Country and California. It’s a set of echoes of an upbringing by communist radicals, not as nostalgia but as a way of making sense, of finding practical applications of the past in the present. Within the film, blood is collected and poured, red filters cover landscapes, and images of desire are both produced and observed. The film is a diaphanous, psychedelic foray into the domestic and the political, looking at ways that politics may erupt, shape a life, form a sensibility, and become inscribed upon a body.
Courtesy of LUX
Variations | Elise Rasmussen | 2014, 20 minutes
Variations re-enacts Ana Mendieta’s last moments before, somewhere between 3:30am and 5:30am of September 8, 1985, she “went out the window” of her 34th floor New York apartment. Her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was tried and acquitted of murder. Andre remains the sole witness to the events of that night.
Playing the role of the director, Elise Rasmussen works with actors to workshop three scenes based on conflicting statements made by Carl Andre as to the events that led to Mendieta’s death. Audience members participate by offering opinions and suggestions for the actors and director as together we try to find a plausible scenario for Mendieta’s death and to investigate general notions of revisionist history.
Courtesy of Elise Rasmussen
ALTIPLANO| Malena Szlam | 2018, 16 minutes
Artist and filmmaker Malena Szlam upends familiar properties of light, time, form and colour to create a dazzling and daring reinvention of the landscape study, one that transforms the unique geological universe of the Andes Mountains into a space both ancient and wholly alien.
Courtesy of Malena Szlam
Unrated 15+
Image: ALTIPLANO, Malena Szlam, 2018