Video

The Rupture Sometimes from Kevin Gotkin on YouTube

The Rupture Sometimes is an essay film that explores the potential of disability to expand and enrich ways of thinking. It features nine scholars and artists (in order of appearance): Alison O’Daniel, Georgina Kleege, Cathy Kudlick, Terry Galloway, Donna Marie Nudd, Amanda Cachia, Patrick Anderson, Sara Hendren, and Jessica Feldman. The film suggests similarities between each of the nine conversations, working towards a capacious notion of disability. Disability, we come to find, is not always about disability as it is usually imagined; it is an escape from the pre-ordained, a place where rupture and emergence become guiding principles for the way we interact with our world. Disability becomes more than an identity or a category. It becomes a way of knowing.

NIGHT SKY TRAILER from Alison O’Daniel on Vimeo.

With Evelina Gaina, Jay Mandell, Deafinitely, Cauleen Smith, Joann Karl, Lucky Dragons, and the voice of Vaughan Rachel

Cinematography by Tom Clancey
Score by Ethan Frederick Greene
Animation by Lisa Ramsey and Justin Acree
Effects by William Downes and Matt Chea
Directed by Alison O’Daniel

Night Sky has parallel, overlapping stories: two girls—Cleo and Jay—travel through the desert while a group of contestants compete in a current-day dance marathon. A small hula-hoop serves as a window between worlds, hovering unnoticed in the midst of the marathon contestants and simultaneously hanging in the desert air. Sound bleeds between the locations, drawing attention to parallel series of events, while locations collapse into one another and places formerly encountered continue to announce their presence.

It’s Sorta Like a Big Hug from Park McArthur on Vimeo.

Tina Zavitsanos
Aliza Shvarts
Park McArthur
Amalle Dublon

In It’s Sorta Like a Big Hug (2012) McArthur had a friend record one of her experiences of being cared for by a collective of friends in her New York City neighborhood. The collective included a group of ten people that McArthur linked together in order to orchestrate and facilitate her bedtime routine each night of the week. McArthur says that processes of unraveling and restabilizing occur as each person in the collective makes themselves vulnerable to one another in the “eventness” of working to deliver each body safely from platform to platform, surface to surface. McArthur invites viewers to think about how the expertness of the care partner’s body and McArthur’s body work their mutual instability together. The artist concludes that the conditions of debility and capacity are tenuous and proximate at all times. Most importantly, this proximity opens up the possibility for us to familiarize ourselves with wide spectrums of “beingness.”

Artur Zmijewski – An Eye for An Eye, 1998 from Hurford Center on Vimeo.

Artur Zmijewski
An Eye for An Eye, 1998
Video projected, 11:28 minutes
Courtesy of Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

Oko za oko (An Eye for an Eye) consists of a set of three large-format color photographs and a video. The photographs and video depict naked men with amputated limbs, accompanied by able-bodied people, who in the staged photographs and in the film “lend” their limbs to the amputated as they stroll, climb stairs or bathe. The naked bodies of the protagonists were assembled by the artist in complex compositions creating bodily hybrids: two-headed men, men with two pairs of arms etc., and at the same time the appearance of new able-bodied organisms in which the “healthy” supply the amputated with substitute limbs. The title of Zmijewski’s work recalls the antique rule of dispensing justice, but the artist is not concerned with the question of revenge but with that of possibilities.

Artur Zmijewski – An Eye for An Eye, 1998, Captioned from Hurford Center on Vimeo.

Artist Christine Sun Kim at Haverford College on YouTube

Artist Christine Sun Kim performed on October 26, 2012 as part of the exhibition What Can a Body Do? curated by Amanda Cachia for the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College. Once the Speaker Drawings Kim created during her performance were complete, they became part of the installation of the exhibition. In this video Kim discusses her interest in sound its use in her work as well as her experience as an exhibiting artist in the exhibition What Can a Body Do? which ran at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College October 26 – December 16, 2012.