Sunday November 13 – Thursday November 17, 11pm PT
Pool Party 2022
In Three Parts
In-Person (November 13 at 3:00pm, 4:30pm, & 6:00pm ET)
Online (Through November 17, 11pm PT)
Organized with Yiran Xu
Works by:
Zainab Aliyu // Yuula Benivolski // Yacob Bizuneh // Zorica Colic // Sara Bonaventura // Jeri Coppola // Gloria Chung // Megan Dieudonné & Andrea Rüthel// Nate Dorr // Sabine Gruffat // Abigail He // Jung-Chul Hur // Lucas Kane // Shon Kim// Kamila Kuc // Anuj Malhotra // Lorenzo Gattorna // Anna Kipervaser // Bayu Kusuma // Michael Lyons // Agustina Markez // Tetsuya Maruyama // Diane Nerwen // Vivian Ostrovsky // Allyson Packer & Jesse Fisher // Duane Peterson III // Rodrigo Nava Ramirez // Francisco Rojas // Jean-Michel Rolland // Niyaz Saghari // Hana Yoo // Yinglin Zhou // Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe
Microscope is very pleased to present Pool Party 2022, a three-part screening program of selected works from our 2021-22 Open Call.
The program features a wide-ranging program of artists, established and emerging, from around the globe utilizing and incorporating Super 8mm, 16mm film, 35mm photographs, miniDV, HD, 4K, stop-motion, 3D animation, computer graphics and other formats. With the majority of works made while the artists were entrenched in lock-down, the event finds many considering their bodies, personal spaces, computer screens, and relationships with nature — other animals and insects, oceans and plant life, and the light from our sun.
Several highly personal works celebrate everyday moments with friends or unearth previously unprocessed memories and histories. Others focus on acts of protests; themes of social justice and war; the excess living styles of the elite; utopian proposals of world community and connection; and a longing for and appreciation of connections.
The program will take place in 3 parts of approximately 65 minutes each, with tickets available for individual parts or for the full program.
All New York-based artists will be in attendance.
We are very grateful to these artists as well as everyone who submitted to the Open Call. Several of these submitted works have appeared in earlier events this year, and others will be programmed in future events, as well.
PART 1, 3pm ET
Yuula Benivolski // Jean-Michel Rolland // Megan Dieudonné & Andrea Rüthel // Bayu Kusuma // Yacob Bizuneh // Lorenzo Gattorna // Vivian Ostrovsky // Zorica Čolić // Anuj Malhotra // Abigail He // Duane Peterson III
PART 2, 4:30pm ET
Nate Dorr // Zainab Aliyu // Kamila Kuc // Diane Nerwen // Jung-Chul Hur // Hana Yoo // Lucas Kane // Rodrigo Nava Ramirez // Francisco Rojas // Sabine Gruffat // Gloria Chung // Shon Kim
PART 3, 6:00pm ET
Niyaz Saghari // Michael Lyons // Tetsuya Maruyama // Allyson Packer & Jesse Fisher // Anna Kipervaser // Sara Bonaventura // Yinglin Zhou // Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe // Agustina Markez // Jeri Coppola
IN PERSON:
Single ProgramGeneral Admission (Part 1, 2 or 3): $10
Member Admission (Part 1, 2 or 3): $8
Full Day Pass
General Admission: $15
Member Admission: $13
Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is an artist and cultural worker whose work is about the material affect of the “immaterial.” She contextualizes the cybernetic and temporal entanglement embedded within societal dynamics to understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all implicated through time. She often dreams, experiments and inquires through built virtual environments, printed matter, video, archives, writing, installation and community-participatory (un)learning. Zai is currently a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, a 2022 fellow at NYU Tisch’s Future Imagination Collaboratory and design director for the African Film Festival at the Film at Lincoln Center in NYC.
Yuula Benivolski is an artist and filmmaker living in Toronto. She utilizes her diary to conjure up images that examine the space between our memories and their historical contexts. Her project Platform currently in production, juxtaposes the reality of a once borderless Palestine against settler colonial land policies in Israel, a place where she grew up. In 2023 she will present In a Room and a Half – new video, textile, and photographic works that reimagine the details of the small Moscow apartment where she spent the first 10 years of her life.
Yacob Bizuneh is an Ethiopian multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Paris, France. He graduated in 2013 with BFA with distinction, specialization in painting at Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design. Yacob taught at Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University until he left for France in 2017. He is producing and conceiving his art works using different mediums like mixed media, found objects, performance and video installation and relating them with daily life in different contexts. From the time of his earliest personal works, Yacob has continued to explore social, economic and political context, and their consequences for human well-being in the countries he has visited. He has participated in several national and international solo and group exhibitions. Currently, Yacob is studying his Masters studies on Ecology of Arts and Medias at University Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis, Paris/France.
Sara Bonaventura (1982) is an Italian visual artist and educator. She works at the intersection between visual and media arts, lens based media and new media. Her video works have been screened worldwide; at Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Independent Short Film Festival, at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Asolo Art Film Festival, Studio 303 for the Montreal Nuit Blanche, Miami New Media Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, at Rome MACRO Museum, Cinemateca do MAM in Rio for Dobra Festival, MOMus in Thessaloniki for Videolands curated by Miden Festival, the itinerant Time is Love screening curated by Kisito Assangni, the Mexico City CODEC festival, Other Cinema at San Francisco ATA Gallery, the LA Echo Park Film Center, the Boston CyberArts Gallery and more.
Gloria Chung lives and works in New York. Her work has screened at film festivals and galleries in the U.S. and internationally.
Zorica Čolić is a visual artist, born in Serbia and based in New York. Using a wide range of media such as video, sound, mixed media sculpture, text and collage, she explores issues around the human body as a cultural symptom, focusing on how its health and well-being are intertwined in the political, economic and cultural realms. Her work has exhibited at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Energy Museum of Santralistanbul, Istanbul, Turkey, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany, Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade, Serbia, and many others. Awards include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York), New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), KulturKontakt (Austria) and Goethe Institute (Germany). Čolić was a resident artist at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, Institute for Electronic Arts, International Summer Academy, Salzburg, Austria. She earned an M.F.A. in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University (Alfred, NY), and a B.F.A. in Painting from Academy of Arts (Novi Sad, Serbia).
Jeri Coppola (b. Neptune, NJ) currently lives and works in NYC and Cape Breton Nova Scotia. After getting her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, she received her MFA from Bard College. Her work is a combination of photography, sculpture and installation that focuses on memory in the body and landscape. Shows include Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace, The Buggy Factory, Brooklyn, NY, Auroras Gallery Sāo Paulo, Brazil, ICP NY and Salon Zurcher’s 11 Women of Spirit. She published Notes on Stills for a Film Not Made through Understory Books.
Megan Dieudonné (b. 1991, Manawatū-Whanganui) is a designer based in Leipzig. Her expanded practice includes investigative desktop essays, techno-critical research and writing, artistic screencasts and design commissions—often websites—in collaboration with individuals and institutions situated in art, academia and digital culture. In 2021, she received an M.F.A. from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg HFBK.
Nate Dorr: My work traces the phantom contours of this late Anthropocene. A product of the era of DSLR photography, I lean into the unique properties and limitations of the digital camera, seeking not to replicate film but to find new modes of capturing, seeing, and interpreting. Based in Brooklyn, lapsed neuroscientist, habitual wanderer of city edges.
Jesse Fisher is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn. After graduating with a degree in Film & Television from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, In 2017, he directed, produced and edited the award-winning documentary Una Nueva Tierra (A New Land). His work has screened at the Ashland Independent Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival and Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.
Lorenzo Gattorna is an experimental filmmaker from New York. He holds a BFA from NYU and an MFA from UIC. He is totally in tune with moving images that embrace revisionist and remodernist perspectives. His short films have recently screened at festivals including CROSSROADS, Experimental Film East Anglia, Moviate, Tonnau, Traverse Vidéo, Fisura, Sphere, Blue Danube, Harkat 16mm, Analogica, International Portrait, Istanbul International Experimental, Cámara Lúcida, Transient Visions, Antimatter, WNDX, DOBRA, Laterale, Braziers International, Bogotá Experimental, Marienbad and Obskura. He has programmed screenings for Anthology Film Archives, Antimatter, Maysles Cinema, Sight Unseen, The Nightingale and UnionDocs. Currently, he is a film/video technician and visiting instructor at Pratt Institute and a workshop instructor at DCTV.
Sabine Gruffat is French-American artist who works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. Sabine’s films and videos have previously screened at festivals worldwide including the MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinema du Reel at the Centre Pompidou Center, Image Forum Festival in Japan, The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Migrating Forms, among others. Her videos are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago. Public and interactive installations have been shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.
Abigail He’s recent work explores the interchangeable relationships between presence/absence, visibility/invisibility in both the material form and the conceptual representation through various media including film, video, sound, photography, performance, and sculpture. Using mainly recycled footage and color leader, she is interested in revealing the intrinsic physicality of film as a medium and a material.
Jung-Chul Hur is a Korean media artist and curator works primarily with videos. His works have been shown at over 150 international festivals, galleries and on TV stations in Asia, Europe, and in South and North America include Video Lisboa (Portugal 2001); Bangor New Music Festival (UK 2002); ‘Breakthrough’, Smithsonian Institute (USA 2003); Microwave (Hong Kong 2004); Media Art Friesland Festival (Netherlands 2005); Athens Video Art Festival (Greece 2006); OPTICA (Spain 2007); VideoMedeja (Serbia 2008); Irpen Film Festival (Ukraine 2009); Abstracta (Italy 2010); Emotion Filmfest (Germany 2011); Thinking MEDIA (Korea 2012); Athens Video Art Festival (Greece 2013); Images Contre Nature (France 2014); Festival Cinema Libre (Germany 2015); Experiments in Cinema (USA 2016); ArsTechne (Poland 2017); thinking MEDIA IV (Korea 2018); Practice 2020 (Thailand 2020); Turn in to Green (USA 2022).
Lucas Kane is a Brooklyn-based film and theater maker, whose work ranges from experimental documentary film to community-based forum theater. For the past year, she’s been exploring the ideological underpinnings and political implications of Brecht’s learning plays by staging them in collaboration with different Brooklyn based activist groups as a means to facilitate conversation around arts and organizing. For money, they work as the Lab Manager and an educator at the cinema non-profit and communal film lab Mono No Aware.
Shon Kim is a filmmaker and visual artist, born in Seoul, S. Korea. He holds BA in Law from Hanyang University, BFA transfer in Film & Video from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts, and Ph. D in Animation Theory from Chung-Ang University. He works in New York.
Bayu Kusuma (b, 14 May 1996) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The practice of returning to the roots of cinema is currently the focus of his work as part of the belief that the only progress of moving ahead in cinema is moving backward. His works has appeared in several international film festival such as 4:3 International Experimental Film Festival in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, EXPRMNTL, Anti-Festival in London, England, United Kingdom, Minikino Monthly Screening & Discussion December 2021, Bali, Indonesia, Bakunawa 8 Film Festival, Philippines, and Ganesha Film Festival, Bandung, Indonesia.
Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist and curator whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and video. Her work has screened at festivals internationally, including at Slamdance Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Field, Antimatter, Fracto, Imagine Science Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, among others. Anna’s work also screens in classrooms, galleries, museums, microcinemas, basements, and schoolhouses! Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Alchemiya, and Canyon Cinema.
Kamila Kuc is a Polish-born, London-based filmmaker, whose hybrid practice stems from the belief that although we are unable to change our pasts, we have the power to shape our future narratives. In her work she often employs speculative histories, memories and dreams to subvert dominant narratives of history and create new points of reference for the future. Set within the realm of social choreography, her work considers complex ways to relate to one another through embodied, trust-building practices that defy the traditional notion of authorship and collaboration. Her first feature film, What We Shared (2021), premiered at the 65th BFI London Film Festival.
Michael Lyons (Canada/Scotland) is a researcher and artist based in Kyoto, Japan. He is currently Professor of Image Arts and Sciences at Ritsumeikan University.
Agustina Markez is an Argentine immigrant artist, currently based in Providence, RI. She received a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelors of Art in Visual Arts and Art History at SUNY Purchase. She is currently an MFA Sculpture candidate at Rhode Island School of Design. Her works in installation, sculpture, video, film and performance examine the way technology, constructed environments and her home can merge.
Anuj Malhotra‘s films have played at venues across the country and internationally. His work has screened at The Flaherty Seminar, Oberhausen Seminar, Sheffield Doc/Fest (Sheffield, UK), Five Million Incidents (New Delhi, India), Woche Der Kritik (Berlin, Germany), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, Germany) and Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, India), among others. He is the founder of Lightcube, an acclaimed film collective and helped conceive the model for The Dhenuki Cinema Project, a multifaceted and versatile project that mobilizes populations in rural areas of the country through the medium of film. His work as a critic has been published in such prestigious publications as photogenie, Senses of Cinema, Asian Film Archive, Woche Der Kritik, Mubi, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, Deep Focus Cinema, and Cinea.
Diane Nerwen is a video artist and art educator. She has shown her work internationally, including screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Tate Modern, London, carriage trade, NY and the Berlin Film Festival. Her work has been supported by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and Creative Capital Foundation. She was awarded a DAAD Artist in Residence Fellowship in Berlin in 2001. Nerwen was born in Montreal and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Vivian Ostrovsky (b.1945, New York) grew up in Rio, studied film studies and psychology in Paris. When she started filming in 1980, she focused on using analog formats – especially Super8 – for experimental cinema. Her signature collage shorts and avant-garde documentaries have been shown at the main film festivals (Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Tribeca) and have been part of collections such as the MOMA, NY, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek in Berlin. Her moving image work is noted for its span of super 8, 16mm, video and digital media, found footage as well as immersive installations. Her films are connected to Latin America and more particularly Brazil. Whether more personal or historical projects, they are always infused with dreamlike playfulness and intimate nostalgia.
Tetsuya Maruyama (Yokohama, Japan, 1983) is an artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes film, performance, sound, installation, and everything between. Maruyama’s work departs from re-contextualization of found banal materials and textures, as a record of his quotidian observations His works have been shown at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, 27th Slavonian Biennial, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Mono no Aware, Bienal de Imagen en Movimiento, Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, Cinemateca Uruguaya, among others. Maruyama currently lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he continues to work in its proximity to nature.
Allyson Packer is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers our embodied relationship to a dematerializing world. Her work has been presented at Nahmad Projects (London), Ada X (Montreal), The University of Barcelona, The University of the Arts Helsinki, The Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), and Aggregate Space (Oakland), among other venues. In 2022, her experimental essay The Tactical Reader was published in the Centre Pompidou’s Journal de l’Université d’été de la Bibliothèque Kandinski. She is represented by birds + Richard gallery and was a 2022 La Box Artist in Residence at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Bourges, France.
Duane Peterson III is a film editor, filmmaker and film programmer using the medium to bring overlooked elements of the past, present and future to light. Central to all of his work is the re-framing of the quotidian, an effort that seeks to challenge perceptions of the status quo and closely examine the fabric of everyday life and the spaces in which it unfolds. He’s interested in exploring new ways of seeing space and time, and taking a critical geography approach toward expressing new understandings of our relationships with each other and our environments. Duane is the 2018 recipient of the Critical Vision Award from the University of California Santa Cruz, where he earned his BA in Film and Digital Media.
Rodrigo Nava Ramírez (he/him) is an artist and computer programmer from Mexico City working in Glasgow and Berlin. Throughout his work, Rodrigo seeks to reframe digital technologies— such as the Web, Augmented Reality, Data Systems, 3D Modelling and Biometrics —practically and conceptually as tools to explore spaces that are materially and temporary restricted, allowing alternative spaces for representation, capable of escaping Western logic and structures. The emancipation of technology as a true decolonizing act of resistance.
Francisco Rojas (b.1993) was born in Coyhaique, Chile, relocating to Santiago in 2002. He studied film at Universidad Mayor from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 he has been working under the discipline of avant-garde/experimental cinema, most specifically abstract cinema. His films have been selected at festivals like FICValdivia, Frontera Sur, Wide Open Film Festival and Pan-Cinema.
A long time musician and a painter, Jean-Michel Rolland brings together his two passions – the sound and the image – in digital arts since 2010. Through video artworks, generative art, audiovisual performances and interactive installations, he questions the temporality, a genuine fourth dimension inherent to moving image, as well as the duality between his two favorite mediums, the sound and the visual.
Andrea Rüthel (b. 1984, Germany) is a filmmaker and artist. Her practice includes experimental documentaries, video, investigative desktop essays and screencasts. She studied Media Art, Media Design and Media Science, and was a participant of the Professional Media Master Class for artistic documentary film at the werkleitz Centre for Media Art in Halle (S.). Based in Leipzig, she is a member of the artist collective FILZ Filmische Initiative Leipzig.
Niyaz Saghari is a UK based Iranian filmmaker. She has studied Film Directing in Tehran Art University and followed her studies by joining the M.A animation course in Newport in UK. She has been directing independent documentary and experimental films. Her work is focused on the urban life in her home town of Tehran and Bristol where she is based. She is a member of BEEF (Bristol Experimental Expanded Film) collective. Her films have been screened at Ann Arbour, Oberhausen and Crossroads festival along with gallery shows and group exhibitions.
Hana Yoo is interested in investigating the collective anxiety and transcendental experiences, formulated from the natural-artificial process of reversing perspective. Working in film and multimedia installation, she engages with the allegory of nature and technological appropriation in the context of human-environment transformation and reconstructs them through storytelling. She studied Media Arts at the Berlin University of Arts and her previous grant awards include a film/video work grant from the Berlin Senate, work grant from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, research grants from the Stiftung Kulturwerk, Kunstfonds Bonn, and Arts Council Korea. In 2021 she held a solo exhibition at Post-territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, and in 2020 at Diskurs Berlin. Her works also have been shown at museums and festivals including the Fotomuseum (Winterthur, CH), European Media Art Festival (EMAF, DE), and Busan International Video Art Festival (Busan, KR) among others. In 2022, she was nominated for Berlin Art Prize.
Yinglin Zhou (1994, CN) is an artist currently working and living in Berlin/Linz. She received her Master’s degree in Art in Context from the University of the Arts Berlin. The artist’s works combine time-based media and digital virtual technologies. With the thinking of linguistic and digital critique, her works examine issues such as the cultural identity, the linguistic possibilities and social issues implicit in the background of globalisation in an intercultural context, cultural hegemony and colonization in different social structures and systems, the graphic confusion of digital virtual worlds and video games, etc.
Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe is a South African video artist and documentary filmmaker, whose work deal extensively with a variety of social and aesthetic concepts. A writer and documentarian by profession and creative inclination, his artistic practices are not bound by convention and dogmas of traditional methodologies. Matela, who also refers to his craft as that of a video poet, has shown a keen interest in the liminal spaces of visual creativity, and has continued to produce challenging and psychologically engaging video poems.His art never fails to employ his inquisitiveness even to his socially critical documentary films, and his unflinching eye endlessly delves into the deepest caverns of the human psyche.