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Filament: TAM Cinema

TAM’s Event Space

Free or by donation

Filament is a moving image series at TAM conceived in dialogue with the exhibition Soft Power – a cinematic response to and reflection on the multivalent themes, both latent and tangible, in the textile-based artwork.

Saturday, March 16, 1pm

Warp and Weft
films by Basma Alsharif, Andrew Kim, Laura Huertas Millán, Abraham Ravett, and Sky Hopinka
2007-2021, digital video and 16mm film, TRT 75 min

A portrait of matriarchal weavers in Mexico whose traditional techniques are intertwined with their own sense of freedom; a meditation on impermanence and mortality from within a taxidermist’s studio; a 50 year old audio recording of a Pechanga language lesson between an artist’s grandmother and mother; a failed attempt at a love story told through images, letters and songs – these five artists’ films explore how material objects can be carriers of memory, familial history, ancestral traditions and how individuals locate themselves within collective experiences. More…

Sunday, April 14, 1pm

God Bless the Child
by Christopher Harris
live multimedia presentation, approx 75 min

A multi-media presentation centered around an upcoming autobiographical film and art project which draws directly from Christopher Harris’ infancy and experience as a foster child. Combining photos, records, and other materials from his personal archives with 16mm film footage he recently shot in Senegal, Harris situates “the carcerality of the social welfare state and child services in relation to Black childhood in the US” within the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade and the French Catholic Church’s colonization of West Africa and the Americas. His hometown of St. Louis, MO and Saint-Louis, Senegal are presented as fraternal colonized twin cities (description courtesy Microscope Gallery). More…

Thursday, May 23, 6pm

Quality Control
by Kevin Jerome Everson
US, 2011, 71 minutes, 16mm transferred to digital, b/w

Quality Control consists of a series of 16mm b/w single
take shots of the fine folks of Alabama producing a
superior product. Filmed in a dry cleaners in Pritchard,
Alabama, Quality Control exhibits the acts as well the
conditions around labor. The film premiered at the
International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2011
and was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 2012. More…

Thursday, August 1, 6pm

In the beginning was the weave, and the transmission of its workings, a curse of mortality—so ends Quantum Creole with the fabulous words of the Papel weaver, Zé Interpretador. While the Punch-card technology, designed for the textile loom was fundamental for the development of the computer, the binary code is closer to the ancient act of weaving than to that of writing. Quantum Creole is an experimental documentary film of collective research into creolization, addressing its historical, ontological and cultural forces. Referring to the minimum physical entity in any interaction—quantum—the film utilizes different imaging forms to read the subversive potential of weaving as Creole code. West African Creole people wove coded messages of social and political resistance into textiles, countering the colonists’ languages and technologies. As the new face of colonization manifests itself as a digital image, upgrading terra nullius in the form of an ultra-liberal free trade zone in the Bissagos Islands, it also marks the continuation of the violence that erupted several centuries ago with the creation of slave-trading posts in the place then known as the Rivers of Guinea and Cape Verde. More…

Thursday, August 15, 6pm

Return to Form: films by Helena Wittmann, Mike Hoolboom, Gariné Torossian, Julie Murray, Miko Revereza, and Morgan Quaintance
various artists, 1994-2021, 16mm and digital formats, 85 minutes

Notions of home – real and imagined, past and the future, are explored through sound and image in these six films, with a focus on the paths of individuals shaped by their diasporic experience.

Thursday, August 22, 6pm

Fabrica Ars : Short Works by Jennifer Nightingale, Jodie Mack, and Grace Ndiritu

Exhibition Information Opening party Artists Filament: TAM Cinema