EarthSea Film Screening

Thursday, December 14, 2023 
6:00pm (Doors at 5:30pm) 
Free and open to the public

EarthSea is a curatorial project in which a select group of curators from around the world decide on a topic of research and artists whose work reflects on that theme. For this iteration of EarthSea, the five women curators--Mira Asriningtyas (Yogyakarta), Jackie Im (San Francisco), Sun Mi Lee (Seoul), Ji Yoon Yang (Seoul), and Hung-Fei Wu (Taipei)--conducted research on eco-feminism and capitalism and each presented on their specific findings in a series of talks. The culmination of this international collaboration is a multi-city film screening featuring the work of Sofía Córdova (United States), Sunjoo Lee (Netherlands/South Korea), Anchi Lin (Taiwan), Fahrettin Örenli (Amsterdam), and Leyla Stevens (Australia). Popcorn and warm drinks provided. 

The title EarthSea is borrowed from American author Ursula K. Le Guin’s series of high fantasy books collectively called The Earthsea Cycle.  
 

About the Films and Artists 

Sofia Cordova

dawn_chorusi: LAPREKUELA, single channel video, 45mins, 2016-2021 
Shot in the woods of Western Finland, the deserts of New Mexico, and the Driftless Region of southwestern Wisconsin, and in conversation with the poetry of Julia de Burgos, the Kalevala, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Tehanu, and Clarice Lispector's Agua viva, this 'play within a play' presents a possible history of our planet in the next 500 years. This video serves as the prequel to the sci-fi video and performance works Echoes of a Tumbling Throne(Odas al fin de los tiempos) and BILONGO LILA: Nobody Dies in a Foretold War. In LA PREKUELA, a trusted set of rituals begin to fail. This failure leads to an unspecified undoing which gives way to the ‘digitally corrupted’ earth in the Echoes and BILONGO works. 

Sofía Córdova makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music's liberatory dimensions, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution - historical and imagined - within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its evolving technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, music, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is one half of the music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA. Her work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, SFMOMA, the Arizona State University Museum, the Vincent Price Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (USA), as well as the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Puerto Rico), Art Hub (Shanghai) and MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany). 

Sunjoo Lee

The Flight, single channel video, 2022 
Sunjoo Lee envisions ways to use and transform human technology from non-human perspectives. The Flight tells the story of the cuckoo's migration over a span of a little over one year, from spring 2019 to summer 2020. The cuckoo, starting in Yangpyeong, a semi-rural county in Korea, traveling as far as Botswana, returns home, having completed a journey of twenty thousand kilometers. The algorithm developed by Lee traces the latitude and longitude coordinates passed through by cuckoo 62395, and searches for videos related to these regions from internet media sites such as YouTube. The videos are then streamed on the installation. The Flight begins with the tagging of the cuckoo, continues through its migration, and ends when the bird returns to meet its death. The cuckoo goes through various countries including South Korea, China, Myanmar, India, Somalia, Kenya, Zimbabwe. The people, the culture, flora and fauna of the places, and nature spanning from forests, seas to deserts are juxtaposed through the streamed videos. 

Sunjoo Lee is an interdisciplinary new-media artist based in the Netherlands. Lee graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018. Lee often collaborates with ecologists and electronics/software engineers to create artistic research projects and multimedia installations. Her works often explore topics such as; technology for more-than-humans, emergence, cyborg bodies, biomimicry, permacomputing and future forms of symbiosis. Lee often uses drawing and writing for the early process, and as final products she makes robots, video installations, workshops, or combinations of these. Lee has exhibited her works at numerous festivals and art spaces such as Ars Electronica, ZeroOne Day (Hyundai Motors), Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, and STRP.  

Anchi Lin
Pswagi Tamahahoi, single channel video, 12min 20sec, 2023
Anchi Lin [Ciwas Tahos] is a Taipei, Taiwan, raised and based new media and performance Artist of Atayal/ Itaṟal and Taiwanese Hō-ló descent. Ciwas's body-centred practice weaves Indigenous Atayal worldview through performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramics and kinetic installation to claim a self-determined queer space. Following a BFA in Visual Art at Simon Fraser University (Canada), she will complete an MFA in New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan). Ciwas's work is an exploration of cultural and gender identity, using her body as a medium to trace their experiences with linguistic and cultural displacement and seek out new queer forms of understanding beyond the hetero-patriarchal status quo. 

Fahrettin Örenli

The Zombie Ants, single channel video, 5min 46sec, 2023 
The fungus travels through the ant's circulatory system to its brain, flooding it with hallucinogens and bending its mind to its will. The fungus then begins to direct the ant's behavior, telling it where to go and what to do, like a puppeteer with a marionette. The fungus needs to live, so it begins to devour its host from within, replacing the ant's flesh with its own. instead, it keeps its puppet alive by preventing decomposition. The Zombie Ants follows the parasitic relationship between the fungus and the ant as a way to critically examine capitalism’s relationship to power, politics, global financial systems, and corruption.

Fahrettin Örenli lives and works in Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Seoul. Örenli’s artistic practices focus on collecting elements from different media and then shifting, separating, investigating, and ultimately recombining them to create a unique language. He studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Netherlands. Örenli’s solo exhibitions include ‘High Heels’ (DEPO, Istanbul, 2016), ‘Money without Nationality’ (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2017 & Pi Artworks, London, 2018), ‘3D SUNSET’ (Project Fulfill Art Space, Taipei, 2018). He has participated in numerous group shows, including ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2018), ‘The State of Transparency’ (Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam, 2019), ‘Noncomformity’ (Muse Contemporary Gallery, Istanbul, 2021). Örenli was awarded the Royal Painting Prize (Amsterdam, 2000) and the ABN AMRO Art Prize (Amsterdam, 2004). 

Leyla Stevens

Groh Goh, single channel video, 29mins, 2023 
GROH GOH re-imagines performance lineages surrounding the mythological figure of the Rangda: Bali’s queen of the graveyard and patroness of black magic. The story of Rangda, and her alter incarnation, the legendary witch widow Calonarang, occupies a central role within Bali’s spirit cosmology and frames a narrative around an undesirable woman as a dangerous and deviant social disrupter. Alongside her feared otherness, Rangda is conceived as a balancing force for spiritual order, and a powerful matriarchal protector. The film centres upon a matrilineal building and passing of knowledge around Rangda, channelling her presence through different bodies, performance genres and landscapes. 

Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist who works within a lens-based practice. Her work has made a significant contribution to expanded documentary genres in Australian video art, as well as exploring the reparative potential of artmaking framed within political and social justice issues. Her practice is informed by ongoing engagements with storied places, archives, cultural geographies and performance lineages through a transcultural lens. The artist was awarded the 66th Blake Art Prize in 2021 for her film, Kidung, which engages with Bali’s silenced histories of political violence. She works collaboratively as a member of Woven Kolektif, an artist group exploring diasporic connections to Indonesia. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art, TarraWarra Museum, UQ Art Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace Sydney, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Guangdong Times Museum and Seoul Museum of Art. She has also been represented in The National 2021: New Australian Art; 2023 TarraWarra Biennial, and the 17th Jogja Biennale. 

program partners