Artists' Television Access

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  • Gaze: BAWAR Benefit: Rage/Resist

    GAZE film series presents a collection of shorts exploring gendered oppression, bearing witness, survivorship, and modes of resistance for a curated screening to benefit the Bay Area Women Against Rape(BAWAR), where call volume and requested services rose dramatically alongside the Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation. In curating this social fundraiser, we hope to respond to the needs of our community by creating a space to process these current events through art, as well as rally and strategize next steps for collective action.

    In partnership with Canyon Cinema and San Francisco Cinematheque, our program emphasizes how women-identified filmmakers historically shape the visual landscape around gendered violence, outrage, and resistance.

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  • Other Cinema:  SCRITTI POLITTI1 (KHALIL/SWEITZER’s EMPTY METAL)

    In our co-presentation with PFA, both sides of the Bay are mobilized by the excitement around this feature debut from a pair of young radicals out of Brooklyn’s fabled Union Docs incubator. With mass surveillance and pervasive policing as context, both outside and in the fiction, Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, here in the flesh, have managed to conjure a revolutionary spirit at world’s end. Set in the near future, their speculative drama, just a few degrees off our current climate of national collapse, opens up a space for imaginative story-telling…but is still close enough to a possible present to pop up in Doc Fests! In their taut thriller, a punk bandis coerced into an assassination plot by militant Native Americans, with support from hackers and hermits. The lives of these several people, at extreme poles of the nation’s social consciousness, weave together into a collective against our American Meltdown. The evening opens with a selection of trailers and clips from the subversive cinema that inspired our guests: Ice, Born in Flames, and Southland Tales plus cameos from Sun Ra and Pussy Riot! 

  • Alex Dabi Zhevi: ’National Theatre’ (Galley Reception)

    It’s a famed Bulgarian colloquialism to remark ‘oh, what a theatre!’ when bearing witness to conflict, the drama of politics or expression of passionate behaviour.

    ‘National Theatre’ is a result of works made in an extended period of residency in Alex’s mother nation of Bulgaria and expanded upon with his return to his nation of upbringing, Australia. The contradictions and possibilities of being influenced by both of these cultures simultaneously results in a questioning of the friction of differences and if any parity exists between them.

    The work employs conventions of slang, counterfeit methods of reproduction and user-generated data to make inquiry into the question of understanding what it is to be ‘other’ versus to ‘belong’.

    Alex Dabi Zhevi is best known for his analogue photography and independent publishing practices. This theatre of identity period has been a significant catalyst for a shift in his practice towards research, text and video-based works.