This panel brings together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th century, complicating and undercutting any nostalgic revisiting of these fraught histories from the vantage point of the present. Others foreground presence and participation in transformational political and social movements, while at the same time underscoring archival absences, silences, ambivalence, and loss. By bringing them and their works into dialogue at MoMA, this post Presents catalyzes a critical cross-cultural conversation around questions of memorialization, translation, failure, and fragmentation.
Participants
Jerónimo Atehortúa
Jihan El Tahri
Naeem Mohaiemen
Mila Turajlić
Artist presentations and discussion
Tuesday, June 20, 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Moderated by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, MoMA
Followed by a reception
The Celeste Bartos Theater
Screenings
Tuesday, June 20, 1:30–5:00 p.m.
Jihan El Tahri. Cuba, an African Odyssey. 2007. 97 min.
Naeem Mohaiemen. Tripoli Cancelled. 2017. 95 min.
The Time Warner Screening Room
Wednesday, June 21, 2:00–5:30 p.m.
Mila Turajlić. Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels. 2022. 94 min.
Jerónimo Atehortúa. Testigos mudos (excerpt). 2023. 25 min.
Jerónimo Atehortúa, Pirotecnia (excerpt). 2019. 35 min.
The Time Warner Screening Room
Participant bios
Jerónimo Atehortúa is a film director and producer born in Medellín. He graduated from the Universidad del Cine, Argentina, and holds an MFA from the Film Factory at the Sarajevo Film Academy, a program directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Atehortúa also holds a law degree from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. For several years, he worked as a film critic for various specialized media outlets. He has directed several short films, including Deán Funes 841, Becerra, La emboscadura, Rekonstrukcija, and Las ruinas. He has produced films such as Federico Atehortúa’s Pirotecnia, on which he was also co-screenwriter, and Mercedes Gaviria’s Como el cielo después de llover. His debut feature film, Mudos testigos (Silent Witnesses), co-directed with Luis Ospina, premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2023 and will be the opening film at FICValdivia 2023. In 2009, his book Aproximación a los estudios de cine y derecho (An Approach to Film and Law Studies) was published by Universidad Externado. In 2020, he published his book Los cines por venir (The Cinemas to Come), which was edited in Colombia, Spain, and Argentina. He has also worked as a teacher in educational institutions in Colombia, Argentina, and Cuba. Atehortúa is a founding partner of Invasión cine, a Colombian independent film collective/production company whose works focus on the tradition of Colombian cinema. His films are produced with an alternative system, focusing on the crossroads of archive and fiction.
Jihan El Tahri is a Franco-Egyptian film director, writer, visual artist, and producer. El Tahri has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2017, and is currently on the selection committee of the Locarno International Film Festival. She has directed more than 15 films and her visual-art exhibitions have traveled to museums and biennials around the world. Her writings include Les Sept Vies de Yasser Arafat and Israel and the Arabs: The 50 Years War. She continues to mentor and direct various documentary and filmmaking labs. El Tahri has served on the boards of several African film organizations, including the Federation of Pan African Cinema and the Guild of African Filmmakers in the Diaspora. El Tahri holds a BA and an MA (1984 and 1986, respectively) in political science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, photography, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings), beginning from South Asia’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and radiating outward to transnational collisions in the Islamicate world after 1945. Despite underlining a historic tendency toward mis-recognition of allies, the hope for a future international left as an alternative to current silos of race and religion is a basis for his work. A through line is the family unit as a locus of pain-beauty dyads, abandoned buildings as staging grounds for lost souls, and the necessity of small prevarications to keep on living. Several conversations around “nonalignment” as a concept container pivoted from the premiere of Mohaiemen’s film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at documenta 14. A reading group set up in Budapest around the film inspired an anthology on transnational visual arts networks, Solidarity Must Be Defended (2023). Historian Vijay Prashad calls him “an archaeologist in search of a future,” and art critic Murtaza Vali points to Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man (1976) as “a hapless history student studying for a PhD, an erstwhile stand-in for Mohaiemen.” He is an associate professor of visual arts and the concentration head of photography at Columbia University, New York.
Mila Turajlić, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist whose documentary works draw on a combination of oral histories, film archives, fiction, and found footage to fabricate a new, reflexive language that confronts memory and ruins with the disappearing narratives of history. Her most recent project, the documentary diptych Non-Aligned & Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels, an archival road trip through the birth of the Third World, premiered at TIFF and IDFA in autumn 2022. Her film The Other Side of Everything (2017) was HBO Europe’s first co-production with Serbia. It won 32 awards, including the IDFA Award for Best Documentary Film and the IDA Best Writing award, and was nominated for the European Parliament LUX Prize. Mila’s debut feature documentary, Cinema Komunisto (2011), played at over 100 festivals and won 16 awards, including the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. In 2018, she was commissioned by MoMA to create archive-based video installations for a landmark exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. Works from her long-term artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels were curated for the 2022 Berlin Biennale, IDFA on Stage, and international exhibitions. Turajlić has been awarded fellowships from the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and artist grants from the Sharjah Foundation and Chicken & Egg. In 2020, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch. She was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2022.
This edition of post Presents is part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. post is MoMA’s online platform devoted to research on art from a global perspective.
The 2023 C-MAP Seminar is organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program.
This year’s C-MAP Seminar is organized in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.
Founded in 2009, C-MAP emerged from a long history of international outreach at the Museum. The initiative is currently organized into three research groups that focus on modern and contemporary art produced in Africa, Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe.
The Museum of Modern Art’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) initiative, of which post is part, is supported by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art and by Agnes Gund, Susan Brotman and Wendy Stark Morrissey.