seen only, heard only through someone else’s description

In conjunction with Image Gardeners, this two-part program of short films, organized by curator and filmmaker Gina Basso, features a multiplicity of images and narratives across space and time to pose urgent questions about temporality, artifice, and memory. Basso takes the program’s title from the 1977 poem Audience Distant Relative by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982). Inspired by Cha’s performance and mail art piece of the same name that used language to unravel dynamics of distance, visibility, hearing and communication, the poem resurfaced in Basso’s consciousness just as the pandemic was quickly becoming less abstract and more of a looming reality in our lives.

seen only, heard only through someone else’s description engages filmmakers and artists whose interdisciplinary practices draw from performance, film, photography, research, and writing. The program includes experimental short films made by women and non-binary artists from the 1970s through the 2010s, presented in two separate sessions Session One - Portraits and Fleeting Glimpses: Sometimes We Stand Alone explores personal identity and history through experimental processes and found footage. Session Two - Drawing Energy: Collectives, Communities and Lineage is concerned with communities of women and their collective power to document and deeply engage with artistic, cultural, or familial lineages.

Sessions One and Two screen sequentially, for eight weeks each. Featured filmmakers include Brenda Contreras, Rita Ferrando, sair goetz, Onyeka Igwe, Lily Jue Sheng, Lucy Kerr, Marie Losier, Deborah Stratman, Tina Takemoto, and Paige Taul, among others. A complete listing of films is to be announced.

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