The next installment in Hallways Microcinema’s film series is coming up with a featured artist, Wenhua Shi, and a Q+A session after the screening on Sunday, January 27th at the IMC in Urbana. You can read more about the event below, and follow along via their Facebook event listing. Hallways Microcinema is a project by David Gracon, a professor at EIU and documentary/experimental filmmaker that lives here in C-U. This is the 22nd volume of his series, which takes place this weekend.
Press release:
Hallways Microcinema Presents
Vol. 22: Sense of Time — Experimental/Poetic Film and Video by Wenhua Shi
Artist in-person. Q/A will follow.
Sunday, January 27th, 2019
7pm
Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center
202 S. Broadway Ave, Urbana, IL
Free (donations accepted)
For more info: [email protected]
Artist Bio for Wenhua Shi
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Wenhua is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and he received his MFA in New Media/Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009.
The Screening Will Include:
Gu-Tai (2018 – )
Wenhua took on a radical use of single frame image capture and examines his strange and familiar hometown in China, which he has been away from for nearly two decades. The film title comes from postwar Japanese avant garde artist group Gu-Tai. The kanji ( Chinese) used to write ‘gu’ means tool, measure, or a way of doing something, while ‘tai’ means body. The film is the result of intense looking and seeing what might not be there.
Senses of Time (2018)
Senses of Time depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work reflects on time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins.(Senses of Time, Morgen & Die Nacht) (2018)
Walking Cycle (2017)
Walking Cycle
Walking Cycle is an abstract audiovisual piece that celebrates the line, its quality, and its movements.Descending a Staircase (2012 – 2016)
This work is a homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Created 100 years after the original piece, it is a meditation on the mechanical nature of cinema/ Moving Images, through its dynamic movement and fragmentation. The footage was captured at an apartment building in Beijing, China.
10 Moments (2012)
10 Moments was created in Beijing, China in 2010. China is at a historic crossroad with the country asserting its global economic power as a new nationalistic identity awakens at home. 10 Moments presents an image contrasting with this incredible pace of change, capturing calm moments of everyday life in Beijing and investigating the current moods of urban China. This piece provides an artistic record of the everyday during an epic moment in China’s history.
Endless (2006)
Endless is a meditation on the inevitable deterioration of certain traditional values that have been established (or destroyed) throughout civilization. This elegiac account uses symbolic representation from natural elements in order to convey the inevitability of remembering the social and cultural erosion, and places a layer of texture in front of the elliptical glimpses of imagery, separating the viewer from the past. The re-occurring image of flames remains untouched by the erosion aspects of reticulation, ultimately alluding to nature’s powerful quality.
Palimpsest (1972 – 2015, maybe)
Palimpsest is a series of video work as a tribute to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. The footage is gathered from Berlin, Beijing and New York and re- examine the three different forms of Modernity and its Utopia. Beijing: found footage was originally shot with Super 8 by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin during Nixon’s China trip.
About Hallways Microcinema
Since 2013 Hallways Microcinema has been a do-it-yourself (DIY) space located at an undisclosed location in downtown Champaign, Illinois. This underground venue hosted semi-regular screenings of hard to find experimental and documentary film and video works; ambient and experimental music; poetry readings, performance art and lectures far outside of the academy and traditional art institutions. David Gracon is the primary programmer (although the space was always open to collaboration and others also pitched events) and host of Hallways Microcinema. To date 22 events have been programmed. Hallways Microcinema is currently operating as a pop up space in Champaign-Urbana. Contact David at [email protected] for more information. Learn more about the previous events at: https://davidgracon.wordpress.com/hallways-microcinema/
Photo from press release
