Counterbalance: Redefining the Archive

In coordination with the exhibition Marisol and Warhol Take New York, join us for a night of film, conversation, and music. Alisha Wormsley, a Pittsburgh-based artist, has curated a selection of experimental artist films to celebrate the often-overlooked place of female filmmakers in film history. Inspired by Marisol’s narrative of great acclaim during her lifetime and the subsequent erasure of her place from art history, Wormsley selected films from six artists, including Akosua Adoma Owusu, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Cauleen Smith, Malakai, Nan Collymore, and Kite, who are making important contributions to reimagining the archive and the advancement of experimental film. The evening includes an introduction from Jessica Beck, Milton Fine curator of art and organizer of the exhibition, an introduction to each film by Wormsley and a screening of each film. The night will conclude with music by Pittsburgh-based DJ, Jessica Fuquay. Registration is required.

Films

Drexciya
Akosua Adoma Owusu
Set in an abandoned swimming pool in Accra, Ghana, Akosua Adoma Owusu’s Drexciya draws on the myth from the Detroit-based electronic band to create an afrofuturist portrait of an underwater subcontinent populated by the unborn children of African women thrown overboard during the Transatlantic slave trade. The Riviera was once known as Ghana’s first pleasure beach. A one-time extravagant Ambassador Hotel of post- colonial – early Kwame Nkrumah era, the Riviera Beach Club thrived until the mid-1970’s. The Olympic-sized pool, now in a dilapidated state, is used for locals for things other than swimming.

Marché Salomon
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Two young workers at a busy Port-au-Prince open-air market have a conversation about the mystical properties of common objects and whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass-produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats.

Pilgrim
Cauleen Smith
A live recording of an Alice Coltrane piano performance accompanied by a visual track that documents a pilgrimage across the USA taken by Cauleen Smith, tracing historic sites of creativity and generosity that were an inspiration to her: Alice Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram; the Watts Towers; and the Watervliet Shaker Historic District.

Souls
Malakai
Unable to deal with her grandmother’s declining mental and physical health, a young girl uses her cardboard spaceship to escape her reality before the matriarch of her family dies.

Flâneuse
Nan Collymore
Grounded in the idea of what Baudelaire described as the “flâneur”—here the shoe is used as a conceit for the true flâneur—the flâneuse—to use as a mode of transport. The shoe, captured in both still and active moments, is positioned as an emblematic symbol by which to decipher those elements and to discover the ground upon which those streets reside.

Pahá kiŋ lená wakháŋ
Kite

“A light cone is the path that a flash of light,
From a single event,
Traveling in all directions,
Takes through spacetime.

On a two-dimensional plane,
The light from the flash
Spreads out in a circle.
These are all the points I ever reach
All points which are the speed of light away from me at birth.”

Marisol and Warhol Take New York is presented by the Richard King Mellon Foundation and generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Jim Spencer and Michael Lin, Alice and Yaso Snyder and the WP Snyder Charitable Fund, Dawn and Chris Fleischner, and Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield. Additional gratitude to friends of The Andy Warhol Museum.

• Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
• Please note: Per CDC Guidelines, for your safety and the safety of those around you, all those attending this event must wear a face mask that covers both the nose and mouth. We reserve the right to require that those in attendance who do not follow safety guidelines or instructions from our staff will be asked to leave the premises. Failure to comply with this policy or rude or aggressive behavior will not be tolerated. Please see our Visitor Conduct Policy for more information.
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