The Jewish Museum Announces New Lineup for
Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video

New York, NY – The Jewish Museum’s exhibition series Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video continues with a diverse lineup of month-long presentations featuring recent film and video works from around the world.  Upcoming programs include Australia (December 2014), Turkey (January 2015), Vietnam (February 2015), Mexico (March 2015), and Hungary (April 2015).

Over the course of two years, Sights and Sounds is exploring new works selected by twenty-five curators from different countries, introducing New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context worldwide. This marks the halfway point of the Sights and Sounds series, following an eventful first year of presentations spanning five continents. Each curator has chosen new film and video works from their respective regions – including Argentina, Vietnam, Nigeria, New Zealand, Egypt, and others. Their selections are screened for one month each in the Museum’s newly refurbished media center, which has been transformed into a miniature cinema. The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience, including spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, and history.  The Sights and Sounds exhibition series will culminate in a 2016 conference and a publication with curatorial statements, essays, film stills, and descriptions. A full list of participating curators follows below.

Upcoming presentations:

Australia, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe – November 28 – December 25, 2014

With the advent of digital media, the use of video as primary medium for Australian artists has increased rapidly. The renewed global interest in performance art is also reflected in Australian practice. The presentation includes Daniel Crooks’ glimpse at of the back alleys of Melbourne’s grand nineteenth-century boulevards, Aboriginal artist Richard Bell’s irreverent exploration of race and national identity, Angelica Mesiti’s depiction of an immigrant busker in Paris singing an Arabic version of the iconic song Hotel California, and Susan Norrie’s visually rich, cinematic investigation of recent natural disasters and social conflict in Japan.

Turkey, curated by Emre Baykal - December 26, 2014 - January 29, 2015

This selection of works from Turkey exemplifies the way moving images incorporate other artistic modes, such as performance and photography. In Nevin Aladağ’s Hochparterre (Mezzanine), the voices of residents in a diverse Berlin neighborhood provide the soundtrack for a single actor, who lip synchs and mimes the stories of their lives and discontents. Zeyno Pekünlü’s Man to Man investigates homosocial behavior in classic Turkish movies by presenting a montage of excerpted scenes in which men emote and interact in the absence of women. Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-White Tulips is a tribute to James Baldwin, a gay African-American writer who lived in Istanbul in the 1960s and 70s, and uses found materials to explore issues surrounding queer politics, identity, racism, self-exile, and transnational discourse. Fatma Bucak’s Blessed Are You Who Come, filmed at an uninhabited site on the Turkish–Armenian border, documents a woman performing a series of silent rituals, exploring the relationships among people of different generations, genders, ethnicities, and religious identities.

Vietnam, curated by Zoe Butt – January 30 - February 26, 2015

Artists face unique challenges in Vietnam, where they are closely monitored and depictions of history are often heavily edited by the Communist bureaucracy. Despite these limitations, they incisively confront the experience of military control, the mythologizing of the past, and the power of broadcast and print media. Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Landscape Series #1 explores the idea of landscapes as quiet witnesses to history through photographs of people outdoors around Vietnam. The Propeller Group’s The Dream documents a Honda Dream motorcycle, a highly coveted status symbol, as it is gradually stripped of its parts over the course of a night on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. UuDam Tran Nguyen’s Waltz of the Machine Equestrians – The Machine Equestrians provides a humorous critique of contemporary social values by depicting a pack of motorcyclists riding through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City as if part of a military equestrian parade. Pham Ngoc Lân’s The Story of Ones offers a glimpse into the social ritual of Hanoi residents as they listen to the national radio on the streets in the early morning.

Mexico, curated by María Inés Rodríguez – February 27 - March 26, 2015

Over the past few decades, shifts in the political, social, economic, and cultural landscape have impacted Mexico and thrown communities into flux. These changes – and their impact in the public sphere – are reflected in the work of Mexican artists. The selection includes: Tania Candiani’s ode to Werner Herzog’s 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo, reflecting the recent demise of the Colombian port of Honda; Jorge Scobell’s dystopian exploration of factory work across Mexico; Edgardo Aragón’s poetic recreation of 1970s military “death flights,” in which traditional drinking gourds are used as stand-ins for murdered rebels and political opponents; and Jorge de la Garza’s meditation on humanity’s historic tendency toward political self-destruction through fragments of films from the 1940s and 1950s.

Hungary, Curated by Tijana Stepanović – March 27 - April 30, 2015

After the end of the Soviet Union, video art became an effective, relatively cheap tool for documentation, analysis, and critique in Hungary. This selection shows the diversity of expression in the medium through works that deal with personal doubts and social conflicts related to national identity, exile, family, and history. The presentation includes: a performance staged in Budapest’s now-defunct gasworks by the artist collective Tehnica Schweiz; László Csáki’s chalk-drawn animation of a darkly humorous thriller by Ambrose Pierce; Anja Medved’s documentary interviews with people who lived on a former border crossing between Italy and Slovenia during the Soviet era; and Csaba Nemes’ puppet tale of a conflict between a white woodsman and a young Roma man who meet in the forest.

Sights and Sounds Curators (In Alphabetical Order):

Nancy Adajania – India

Miguel Amado – Portugal (September 2014)

Jude Anogwih – Nigeria

Emre Baykal – Turkey

Zoe Butt – Vietnam

Natasha Conland – New Zealand

Joselina Cruz – Philippines

Patrick D. Flores – Singapore (October 2014)

Juan A. Gaitán – Colombia

Daria Ghiu – Romania (March 2014)

Erin Gleeson – Cambodia (Nov. 2013 – Jan. 2014)

Mia Jankowicz – Egypt

Inés Katzenstein – Argentina

Miguel A. López – Peru (April 2014)

Carol Yinghua Lu – China (July 2014)

Mailyn Machado – Cuba

Nontobeko Ntombela – South Africa

Melanie O’Brian – Canada (May 2014)

Luiza Proença – Brazil (February 2014)

María Inés Rodríguez – Mexico

Suzana Sousa – Angola (June 2014)

Tijana Stepanović – Hungary

Chen Tamir – Israel (August 2014)

Wayne Tunnicliffe – Australia

Joanna Warsza – Poland (November 2014)

Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is organized by Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, and Rebecca Shaykin, Leon Levy Assistant Curator.