Installation view, "Jazz" Henri Matisse, Jazz serigraphy © Succession H Matisse/Bildupphovsrätt 2024. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Film Programme
Currently on Display
Chapter 6: Bouchra Khalili – Twenty-Two Hours
23 April–16 June 2024
A key figure in Bouchra Khalili’s film installation “Twenty-Two Hours” is Jean Genet, the French writer and political activist, who came to the United States between March and May 1970. He was there at the invitation of the Black Panther Party, a Marxist and Black power organization founded in 1966. Genet delivered a speech at a May Day rally in New Haven, Connecticut, where he says, “I must be very careful when I speak in the name of the Black Panthers.”
Genet was aware of his position and privilege in relation to the Party and knew that he, as a white queer male, could not embody their struggle or politics. Instead, he aligned his own activism with the politics of the BPP, and championed solidarity.
Bouchra Khalili states: “What interests me in Jean Genet’s position is how he embodies a metaphor of the artist. He does not speak for the people he stands in solidarity with, but rather bears witness to those whose words remain unheard or are silenced. […] When developing “Twenty-Two Hours”, the title came first. Twenty-two hours is the length of time that Genet spent with Hamza, the young Palestinian fedayi who inspired him to write “Prisoner of Love” (1986) and was instrumental in Genet’s commitment to the Palestinian revolution. I chose that title to ask a simple question: Are twenty-two hours enough to dedicate oneself to the struggle of other people? […] At a moment when issues of alliance and solidarity are widely discussed, it is important to remember Genet’s example.”
Film
Twenty-Two Hours
by Bouchra Khalili (43 min, 2018)
In Khalili’s “Twenty-Two Hours”, two young African American women examine Genet’s commitment to the Black Panther Party. In a layered narrative they take on the roles of both storytellers and editors, combining fragments of images, sounds, stories, and film footage.
Simultaneously, Doug Miranda, a former prominent member of the Black Panther Party who was involved in organizing Genet’s tour on the East Coast of the USA, narrates his meetings with the French intellectual and his own role in the Party.
The Politics of Space
30 September–16 November 2023
In the first chapter of the film programme we consider the questions of belonging and self-representation that play a key role in this exhibition – through the lens of artists who work or have worked in Stockholm. The artists examine public space: how we give it meaning, who it ”belongs” to, and how we can activate it differently.’
If the home is ”an inside space”, as Rashid Johnson puts it, that one gets to ”shape and define”, then public space is an exterior space that we all own, shape, and give
meaning.
Sense and Sense (15 min, 2010)
by Every Ocean Hughes
Delay (4 min, 2014)
by Santiago Mostyn
If you could speak Swedish… (23 min, 2001)
by Esra Ersen
Paralyzed (3 min, 2003)
by Klara Lidén
Space is the place
14 November–17 December 2023
In this chapter, we travel to places far and near, through the legacy of jazz legends Sun Ra (1914−1993) and Alice Coltrane (1937−2007). First, we land in Chicago, where artist Cauleen Smith (b. 1967) filmed “Space is the Place (A March for Sun Ra)”. This project draws on the work of the groundbreaking composer Sun Ra, who channeled African-American history, science-fiction, and poetry towards a new vision of the future. He was a key figure in Afrofuturism, in which the histories of slavery and oppression of black people is evoked through fantasy and science-fiction.
Smith captures the spontaneous performance of the Rich South High School marching band playing Sun Ra’s composition Space is the Place. Undeterred by the pouring rain and the evident confusion of onlookers, the young musicians display great enthusiasm playing, singing, and dancing to Sun Ra’s still-powerful drum beat.
We resume our journey with Cauleen Smith: a pilgrimage to utopian spaces across the United States, accompanied by a soundtrack of Alice Coltrane’s “One for the Father” (1978).
Space is the Place (A March for Sun Ra) (11 min, 2011)
by Cauleen Smith
Space is the Place (85 min, 1974)
by Sun Ra
Pilgrim (2017)
by Cauleen Smith
Tony Cokes
19 December 2023–28 January 2024
In this third chapter of the film program, we delve into the work of American artist and filmmaker Tony Cokes (b. 1956).
Cokes started creating video essays in the 1980s with a keen interest in our affective experience of colour and sound. He mixes found material, whether that be documentary footage, fragments from academic texts on black histories, or electronic and popular music.
In his work, Cokes subverts (mis)representations of racial identities, investigating the emergence of house music in Chicago within Afro-American communities in the late 1970s, and the role of music in shaping our shared understanding of cultural history.
Black Celebration: A Rebellion Against the Commodity
by Tony Cokes (17 min, 1988)
Mikrohaus, or the black atlantic?
by Tony Cokes (31 min, 2006–2008)
1!+: a dubstep primer
by Tony Cokes (37 min, 2001)
Lights – Camera – Play!
30 January–10 March 2024
In the spirit of dialogue and improvisation that marks this gallery, two films from the Moderna Museet’s collection here show how play comes into the relationship between artists – collective experiments that the camera appears to have caught in the moment. The two filmmakers share the use of the camera as an engaged participant rather than a neutral observer.
Video artist Charles Atlas (b. 1949) is a pioneer in dance and performance for the camera. In “From an Island Summer”, he follows choreographer Karole Armitage and her dancers during a couple of August days along the Coney Island boardwalk and the streets around Times Square.
Robert Breer’s (1926–2011) “Pat’s Birthday” depicts the celebration of poet Patty Mucha in the company of her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, and a circle of their artist and stage friends. Oldenburg had been working with happenings in the early 1960s when he and Breer decided to make a film together. He orchestrated a series of whimsies for the birthday celebration at the couple’s countryside house, giving Breer free rein with the camera.
Curator: Lena Essling
From an Island Summer
by Charles Atlas (13 min, 1983–1984)
Pat’s Birthday
by Robert Breer (13 min, 1963)
shitfictions
12 March–7 April 2024
What if the bed becomes a space of shelter and refuge, containment and lockdown, speculation and shitfictions? Performer and curator Michelangelo Miccolis and artist and performance producer nick von kleist respond:
“Stuck in quarantine we, Michelangelo and myself, have kept ourselves occupied with a deluge of cinematic nostalgia. We found simply rewatching tedious, so we began watching movies with subtitles we had downloaded from other films and tv. One of our first experiments was watching “Lost in Translation” (2003) with subtitles from Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (1966). The moment Scarlet Johansson’s face came on screen with the subtitle: ‘Elisabet Vogler”– we immediately paused it and burst into laughter at the random synchronicity and absurdity in the new collage.
This began a daily growing archive with this and more subtitles from “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010), “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), “Inland Empire” (2006), “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973), “Crimes of the Future” (2022), and many more. Even with this expanding incidental archive, we keep returning to Elisabet Vogler.
This process centers on seeing. Extracting and blending what we choose to remember and to archive, and how that frames what we can convey. This random fan fiction is really just that, a reimagining and record of our experience, while we tossed the title Elisabet Vogler between one another.”
shitfictions
by Michelangelo Miccolis and nick von kleist (Random and continous, 2020-today)
