@SEA #22: Stateless
The Poetic Research Bureau's Sunday matinee salon returns with four filmmakers, two writers, and, in the late afternoon, a terrific underseen feature-length documentary!
@SEA ("at sea") is a live magazine of interdisciplinary arts that pivots around a one-word theme. This, the 22nd issue of our magazine, contemplates the keyword "stateless" – in all its governmental, judicial, computational and phenomenological senses.
From 1pm to 3pm, this issue will include four short films, poetry, and an essay in conversation with our topic. We'll then take an intermission for lunch, and resume the program at 5pm with a showing of Želimir Žilnik's 2018 feature The Most Beautiful Country in the World.
Come Sunday to 2220 Arts and Archives to experience:
Films by Zaina Bseiso, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Nehal Vyas, Ara Oshagan and Želimir Žilnik
A essay translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches
Poetry from Ara Shirinyan
2220 Beverly Blvd. Free!
* * *
Issue 22's participants:
Zaina Bseiso is a film director, producer, and curator working primarily in documentary and experimental cinema. Her work explores the relationship between the materialities of place and issues of memory, surveillance, corporeality, and nationalism. She received her Master’s degree in Film and video from the California Institute of the Arts. Bseiso is based in Los Angeles and was raised in Egypt by Palestinian parents. Her practice mainly traverses among Egypt, Palestine, Cuba, Mexico, and the US. She is co-founder of Bahía Colectiva, a community of filmmakers that collaborate in practice and curation.
Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and writer who, in 2009 was transplanted from street protests in a city of four seasons to the windowless rooms of the University of Southern California where aesthetics and politics would be discussed in endless summers. Gelare’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Hammer Museum, LAXART, Human Resources, and Visitor Welcome Center, among others, with words published in many publications, including contemptorary (co-founding editor), The Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, X-TRA, and LA Review of Books. Gelare is an editor at MARCH: a journal of art and strategy.
Ara Oshagan is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, curator and cultural worker whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession and violence as well as diasporic identity, memory and community. A descendant of survivors uprooted from their indigenous land by the Armenian Genocide, Oshagan was born in diaspora in Beirut and was displaced again to the US by the Lebanese civil war. Oshagan has published two books of photography (third forthcoming) and his work has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, LA Times and Art Papers, among others. He is currently a curator at the City of Glendale ReflectSpace Gallery.
Julia Sanches has translated more than a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. Her recent translation of Mexican-born Mariana Oliver's Migratory Birds was reviewed last month in the LA Review of Books. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she spends her free time making things out of clay.
Ara Shirinyan is the author of several collections of poetry, including Handsome Fish Offices, Syria is the World, and Speech Genres 1-2. He is the founder of Make Now Press and a former co-director of the Poetic Research Bureau. This October is the thirteenth anniversary of the publication of his Your Country Is Great, from which he'll read selections for the 'disputed' states at this Sunday's event.
Nehal Vyas (b. 1995) is a filmmaker and video artist from India, currently based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the idea of national identity through memory, personal history and inheritance. She is currently a Film/Video MFA candidate at California Institute of the Arts.
Želimir Žilnik (born in 1942; living and working in Novi Sad, Serbia) has written and directed numerous feature and documentary films which have reaped many awards at domestic and international film festivals. From the very beginning his films have focussed on contemporary issues, featuring social, political and economic assessments of everyday life. The breakdown of the system of values in post-transitional Central and Eastern European countries and the problems concerning refugees and migration in the new circumstances of an extended Europe became the focus of Žilnik's most recent films, including One Woman - One Century (2011), Pirika on Film (2013), Logbook_Serbistan (2015) and this Sunday's feature: The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018).
~
Readings are supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts 2021 Organizational Support Grant.