Who: Michael Ondaatje, Jordan Pavlin What: Poetry reading and discussion Where:Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway at West Twenty-Sixth St. When: Thursday, April 4, free with advance RSVP, 6:00 Why: “When you are surrounded with ornaments / of the old world, you need to hear one living vein,” Michael Ondaatje writes in “A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa,” from his new poetry book, A Year of Last Things (Knopf, March 19, $28). He later adds, “Most stories remain unresolved, / undiscovered, like the breaking of a rule.” On April 4 at 6:00, the eighty-year-old Sri Lankan-born Canadian author, who has penned such novels as The English Patient,Anil’s Ghost, and Warlight, will be at Rizzoli to launch A Year of Last Things; he will read from the work, which contains such poems as “Lock,” “Definition,” “Lost,” “A Disappearance,” and “Stillness,” and sit down for a conversation with Knopf editor-in-chief Jordan Pavlin. Admission to the event, which is presented by the Authors Guild Foundation with support from the Academy of American Poets, is free, but reservations are strongly encouraged. Presigned books will be available at the end.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
PAYMENT OF THE ARGENTINE FOREIGN DEBT TO ANDY WARHOL WITH CORN, THE LATIN AMERICAN GOLD
Americas Society
680 Park Ave. at Sixty-Eighth St.
Tuesday, March 26, free with advance RSVP, 6:30 www.as-coa.org
In 1985, multidisciplinary artist Marta Minujín went to the Factory to participate in a unique performance with Andy Warhol. The Argentine-born Minujín and the Pittsburgh-born Warhol sat back-to-back in red folding chairs amid one thousand ears of corn; each artist was dressed all in black, except for the platinum blond Minujín’s yellow and orange socks and the silver-wigged Warhol’s grayish-white sneakers. Titled Payment of the Argentine Foreign Debt to Andy Warhol with Corn, the Latin American Gold, the conceptual performance piece, printed in 2011 in a six-photo grid against a white background, involved the forty-two-year-old Minujín, wearing dark sunglasses, presenting the fifty-six-year-old Warhol with the international food staple maize, which had been painted yellow and orange. Over the course of the photographs, they turn to each other, look directly at the camera, and exchange a handful of ears. After the performance, Minujín and Warhol signed the corn and handed ears out to people in front of the Empire State Building, the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous films, Empire.
“Simply put, Argentina’s always owed money to the International Monetary Fund. Always. Then I thought, ‘This country’s fed the entire world by now,’ because during World War II, Argentine ships would sail out laden with seeds and corn for people to make bread and everything. So many ships sailed out, in fact, that their lives were extended by what they received from Argentina. So, for me, the dollar debt had already been settled,” Minujín says on the audioguide that accompanies the Jewish Museum exhibition “Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!,” where Payment is part of an exciting career survey of the artist through April 1. “I wanted to be done with the subject and figured I’d pay Andy Warhol. He was a friend of mine, and our intentions, way of living, everything was aligned. So, I paid off Argentina’s foreign debt to him in Latin American gold — corn. That was the idea behind this piece. Now, many issues still remain around the dollar, but it’s as though I’ve paid off this debt. For me, it’s settled. Even for Argentina, it’s settled — it has been for many years now.” One of the photos was also on view in the recent Americas Society show “El Dorado: Myths of Gold Part I.”
On March 26, Minujín will restage the event at Americas Society; admission is free with advance registration. Americas Society director and chief curator of art Aimé Iglesias Lukin and Jewish Museum associate curator Rebecca Shaykin will introduce the performance, which will be followed by a reception.
MARTA MINUJÍN: ARTE! ARTE! ARTE!
Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Monday through April 1, free – $18 thejewishmuseum.org
“Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!” is the artist’s first comprehensive US museum survey, and it’s a revelation. Five years ago, she restaged her labyrinthine Menesunda Reloaded at the New Museum, drawing long lines. She deserves long lines again for the Jewish Museum exhibition, which includes nearly one hundred paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations, alive with bright colors and immersive experiences. Conceptos entrelazados (Intertwined Concepts) is an inviting foam-stuffed mattress bursting with bold colors and patterns. Congelación a lo largo (Autorretrato de espaldas) (Long-Term Freeze [Self-Portrait with Back Turned]) at first appears to be a gentle landscape but is actually an elongated nude body that is part of Minujín’s “Frozen Sex” series. Pandemia (Pandemic) is a canvas of 27,900 pieces of hand-painted and glued mattress fabric created during the coronavirus crisis. El Partenón de libros (The Parthenon of Books) is an examination of a 1983 performance piece in which the artist built a Parthenon-shaped tower of banned books, now accompanied by contemporary American banned books. Soliloquio de emociones encontradas (Soliloquy of Mixed Emotions) undulates with enticing shapes and colors. And Implosión! is a dazzling, dizzying immersive room exploding in a whirlwind of 3D-like projections and sound.
“I don’t have origins. I have my own planet,” Minujín says in one of the above videos. The exhibition at the Jewish Museum ably displays that, as will the live performance at Americas Society.
Even house arrest and potential imprisonment cannot stop Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi from telling cinematic stories
THIS IS NOT A FILM (IN FILM NIST) (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Monday, March 25, 7:00
Series runs March 22-28
718-636-4100 canopycanopycanopy.com www.bam.org
“You call this a film?” Jafar Panahi asks rhetorically about halfway through the revealing 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film, screening March 25 at 7:00 at BAM as part of “Triple Canopy Presents: Standard Deviations,” a weeklong festival, curated by Yasmina Price, consisting of works that challenge cinematic norms in visual and narrative storytelling. “Standard Deviations” opens March 22 with Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess and concludes March 28 with Ephraim Asili’s “Multisensory Alchemies: Daïchi Saïto + Konjur Collective,” featuring films accompanied by live music, followed by a Q&A. Other highlights are Stephanie Rothman’s The Student Nurses, William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Wandering Soap Opera.
After several arrests beginning in July 2009 for supporting the opposition party, highly influential and respected Iranian filmmaker Panahi (Crimson Gold,Offside) was convicted in December 2010 for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Although facing a six-year prison sentence and twenty-year ban on making or writing any kind of movie, Panahi is a born storyteller, so he can’t stop himself, no matter the risks. Under house arrest, Panahi has his friend, fellow director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Lady of the Roses), film him with a handheld DV camera over ten days as Panahi plans out his next movie, speaks with his lawyer, lets his pet iguana climb over him, and is asked to watch a neighbor’s dog, taking viewers “behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films.” Panahi even pulls out his iPhone to take additional video, photographing New Year’s fireworks that sound suspiciously like a military attack. Panahi is calm throughout, never panicking (although he clearly does not want to take care of the barking dog) and not complaining about his situation, which becomes especially poignant as he watches news reports on the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.
“But you can’t make a film now anyhow, can you?” Mirtahmasb — who will later be arrested and imprisoned as well — asks at one point. “So what I can’t make a film?” Panahi responds. “That means I ask you to take a film of me? Do you think it will turn into some major work of art?” This Is Not a Film, which was smuggled out of Iran in a USB drive hidden in a birthday cake so it could be shown at Cannes, is indeed a major work of art, an important document of government repression of free speech as well as a fascinating examination of one man’s intense dedication to his art and the creative process. Shortlisted for the Best Documentary Academy Award, This Is Not a Film is a mesmerizing experience from a genius who has since gifted the world with Closed Curtain,Taxi,Three Faces, and No Bears, defying the government while constantly looking over his shoulder.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris mon amour explores inner and outer space using found footage
SOLARIS MON AMOUR (Kuba Mikurda, 2023) / HANDFUL OF DIRT (GARSTKA ZIEMI) (Izabela Zubrycka, 2023)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, March 15, $15, 6:30
Series runs March 13-17, individual screenings $15, Weekend Pass $60, All-Festival Pass $120
718-777-6800 www.movingimage.us
Despite its tantalizing title, Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris Mon Amour is not an experimental film lover’s fantasy mashup of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour. Instead, it’s a fascinating journey into grief and trauma, dreams and memory, using found scientific footage to create a compelling and haunting cinematic experience.
Mikurda goes back to Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris, which the Polish writer and philosopher began writing in 1959, the year that Hiroshima mon amour was released. The latter is about an actress and an architect who have a torrid affair in one of the two cities that the United States dropped the atomic bomb on in 1945; the former imagines a planet where an astronaut encounters what appears to be his dead wife, among other strange things.
Mikurda and editor Laura Pawela piece together their forty-seven-minute black-and-white story out of excerpts from more than seventy films in the WFO archives at the Educational Film Studio in Lodz made between 1952 and 1982, including Earth Our Planet,Life of the Stars,Radiographic Study of Metals,The World of Mold,Injections,Jellyfish,Plasma Torch,ABC of Cosmonautics, and She Put Down Foots Filled the Ground, accompanied by Marcin Lenarczyk’s sci-fi soundtrack. The images range from the sun, moon, and stars to technical equipment, brain tissue, blood molecules, microorganisms, astronaut training, flames, random numbers, and extreme close-ups of unidentified people, along with audio clips from Jozef Grotowski’s 1962 and 1970 radio adaptations of Solaris.
“It was the first and only totally incomprehensible case in my life,” Kris Kelvin says. “I’m flying to Solaris because I think this is about ourselves, about the limits of human cognition.”
The director was inspired by Agnieszka Gajewska’s books Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem and Stanislaw Lem: Exiled from the High Castle, in addition to such films as Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog, and György Palfi’s Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen; it also made me think of Bill Morrison’s Decasia, with its decaying film stock.
Solaris Mon Amour opens with a shot of a camera lens facing slightly off center, tracking a man checking the grassy ground in a field and digging into the earth. “How exhausting. Need to wake up,” a voiceover says. Mikurda then cuts to a view of the universe and, later, microscopic images, equating the camera and the microscope, two instruments humans employ to learn more about the world and our place in the universe. Mikurda (Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk,Escape to the Silver Globe) crafts it all into a hypnotic audiovisual mystery that will keep echoing in your mind long after it’s over.
Izabela Zubrycka’s Handful of Dirt follows a rural Polish funeral singer and her gravedigger son
Solaris Mon Amour is being shown March 15 at 6:30 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s thirteenth annual First Look festival, running March 13–17, comprising more than two dozen events, from North American film premieres to screenplay readings, workshops, and an art reception. Mikurda’s film will be preceded by Izabela Zubrycka’s student documentary Handful of Dirt (Garstka Ziemi), which also explores such themes as grief and loss. Zubrycka focuses on Halina Waszkiewicz, one of the last funeral singers in Podlasie, Poland, and her son, gravedigger Andrzej Wójcik. The thirteen-minute short echoes Solaris Mon Amour in its own way, with shots of the sun, sky, and moon, Wójcik digging into the earth, moments of silence, extreme close-ups, and talk of time, dreams, sleep, and death.
Writer-director Zubrycka, cinematographer Stefan Żółtowski, editor Anna Adamowicz, and sound recordist Maciej Tobera follow Andrzej as he prepares the graves and Halina joins a group of singers in black who will help the deceased cross over through song. “I wasn’t afraid and I’m not afraid of the dead,” Halina says. “What is death?”
Mikurda and Zubrycka will be at the screening at MoMI’s Redstone Theater to discuss their work. First Look kicks off March 13 with Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo and Charlie Shackleton’s short Lateral and continues with such films as Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt’s Magic Mountain, Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight, and Lois Patiño’s Samsara.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Winner of the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational Grand Prize, Koryn Wicks’s Casting is making its New York City debut March 15-17 at Gymnopedie in Bushwick. Most performers dread the audition process, but in this case up to twelve audience members at a time will participate, trying to land a big role. The thirty-minute work was created by Wicks (I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH; To Die in the Valley I’ve Loved) and a team of collaborators that includes writer Sam Alper, singer-songwriter Hanah Davenport, lighting and video designer and dancer Morgan Embry, sound designer and composer Alex Lough, and actors Audrey Rachelle and Jonathan Gordon. Tickets are $23.18 for your chance to be the star of the show.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who:Martha Graham Dance Company What: Graham Studio Series: “GrahamDeconstructed” Where: Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune St., eleventh floor When: Wednesday, March 13, and Thursday, March 14, $20-$30, 7:00 Why: Martha Graham’s ongoing Studio Series “GrahamDeconstructed” continues March 13 and 14 with a behind-the-scenes look at The Rite of Spring, which the company debuted in 1984. Graham had performed in the first American production of the work, by choreographer Léonide Massine and composer Igor Stravinsky, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, in 1930. More than fifty years later, she revisited the thirty-five-minute piece, and, for its fortieth anniversary, it will be part of the troupe’s upcoming season at City Center next month, along with Graham’s Appalachian Spring, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, and a world premiere by Jamar Roberts and Rhiannon Giddens. For “GrahamDeconstructed,” there will be a full rehearsal run-through of The Rite of Spring, which features two soloists (the Chosen One and the Shaman) and an ensemble of eighteen, with commentary from Graham experts and original cast members.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein (nasa4nasa) are part of 2024 Movement Research Festival (photo by Rachel Keane)
MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL: PRACTICES OF EMBODIED SOLIDARITY IN MOVEMENT(S)
122CC, 150 First Ave.
Judson Church, 55 Washington Square South
Danspace Project, 131 East Tenth St.
February 28 – March 9, free with advance RSVP movementresearch.org
The theme of the 2024 Movement Research Festival is “Practices of Embodied Solidarity in Movement(s),” consisting of nine days of live performances, workshops, and talks at three downtown locations: 122CC, Judson Church, and Danspace Project. Curated by Marýa Wethers, director of the GPS/Global Practice Sharing Program at Movement Research, the program features dance artists who are part of GPS MENA, the Middle East and North Africa Exchange Program: Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein (nasa4nasa) from Egypt, Sahar Damoni from Palestine, Lori Kharpoutlian and Charlie Prince from Lebanon, and F. M. Sayna from Iran; the festival will explore sociopolitical issues that reflect the state of the world today.
Below is the full schedule; all events are free with advance RSVP.
Wednesday, February 28, 6:30 pm
“GPS Chats: Solidarity, Displacement, and Inverted Process in Contemporary Practice,” with F. M. Sayna, Lori Kharpoutlian, and Charlie Prince, 122CC
Thursday, February 29, 10:00 am
“Workshop: back2back,” with nasa4nasa (Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein), 122CC
Friday, March 1, 10:00 am
“Workshop: the body symphonic,” with Charlie Prince, 122CC
Saturday, March 2, 10:00 am
“Workshop: Lemon Water ma’a Nana (Moving in your own space, and out of it),” with Sahar Damoni, 122CC
Monday, March 4, 7:00 pm
“Performance: Movement Research at the Judson Church,” with solos and group improvisation by Lori Kharpoutlian, F. M. Sayna, Sahar Damoni, and Charlie Prince, Judson Church
Wednesday, March 6, 7:00 pm
“Studies Project: The Political Body in Solo and Collaborative Performance,” with Salma AbdelSalam, Sahar Damoni, and Noura Seif Hassanein, 122CC
Thursday, March 7, 7:30 pm No Mercy, by nasa4nasa (Salma AbdelSalam and Noura Seif Hassanein), Danspace Project
Friday, March 8, 7:30 pm Eat Banana and Drink Pills, by Sahar Damoni, Danspace Project
Saturday, March 9, 7:30 pm Cosmic A*, by Charlie Prince, Danspace Project
