Friday, January 6, 6-8pm
Beyond Nuclear Family: Closing Event

Film Screening at 6pm: Julie Béna, Strakati, 2022, 27 min.

Followed by Artists Talks with Michelle Levy and Chiara No + Q&A

Introduction and moderated by Tereza Jindrova

Julie Béna’s film Strakati casts doubt on the stereotypical position of the artist as someone who puts their practice before their family, a situation made all the more complicated if the person in the role of artist is a woman. The film may be viewed as a complex and authentic coming to terms with social judgment, as well as self-reproaches regarding the work-family conflict. Chosen with deliberation, the genre of horror and nightmare gives the artist room to play with, and symbolically exaggerate, the roles of mother, wife and daughter. Employing hyperbole, their relationships are inverted when she uses and abuses her family for her art. The main protagonist is a maliciously capricious jester come prankster. Both seductive and dictatorial, the character uses and exploits the behavioral mechanisms and attitudes associated with dark humor. Verging towards a tragic clown show, the film employs physical gestures instead of words to lay bare the artist’s antithetic emotions. Emphatically overacted, it oscillates between laughter and tragedy. Somewhere between mimes and clowns, the figures wear striking make-up on their faces and the tension in their bodies gives the impression of tragic pantomime. The film’s main roles are played by the artist and her real family. Involving her family and abusing them as performers in a film leads the artist towards catharsis, cleansing and reinforcement.

In the fall of 2018, artist/performer Michelle Levy went to Poland for nine months to investigate the 1945 wartime testimony of a Polish-Jewish woman, Paulina, a supposed relative who lost her family and survived on her own throughout Nazi-occupied Poland. The heart of Michelle's investigation was a road trip retracing Paulina's wartime path with her Polish counterpart, Patrycja, a Polish-Jewish "midwife" to untold stories. Their plans went beautifully off-track when a series of strange errors and coincidences led to a confrontation with the dead and an existential reckoning in which a promise was made. What began as an investigation into one woman's account of survival, has evolved into a story about trying to create a family against biological odds and standard narratives. Emerging from a multi-year iterative performance, the Paulina film (now in development) picks up two years after Michelle's return from Poland when she finally understands how to complete this story.

In the exhibition Beyond Nuclear Family: Home Sweet Home Chiara No presents a thematic selection of short videos addressing women’s choice not to have a child, created for and previously shared on social media platforms and during the closing event she will talk about this part of her practice. She works in various media, targeting topics such as confrontational humanism, sex positivity, kink, Herstories, feminizing language and literature, ecofeminism, Goddess Powers, re-contextualizing heroines in Greek Mythology and history, folklore, witchlore, anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, anti-racism, pro-Others, demonology, abjec- tion, feminist horror theory, nihilism or Heavy Metal.

Bios

Julie Béna was born in 1982 in Paris, France, and currently lives and works between Prague and Paris. She is a graduate of the Villa Arson, Nice, and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 2012–13, she was part of le Pavillon, the research laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2018, she was nominated for the Prix AWARE women art prize. Julie Béna was born in 1982 in Paris, France, and currently lives and works between Prague and Paris. She is a graduate of the Villa Arson, Nice, and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 2012–13, she was part of le Pavillon, the research laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2018, she was nominated for the Prix AWARE women art prize.

Michelle Levy is a Brooklyn-based artist and storyteller who uses performance, imagery, text, and collective engagement to investigate the mediated space between life and fiction where identity is constructed. She has presented her work in venues across New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Krakow, Szczecin, Warsaw, and Prague. For the past five years, Levy has been immersed in an evolving performance and engagement post-memory project, "Paulina," which has received support from POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw), Asylum Arts (NYC), U.S. Embassy, Warsaw, The Emmanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), Festivalt and the Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow), amongst numerous other institutional partners. She is currently developing this project as a feature-length nonfiction film supported in its early phase by a grant from New York State Council on the Arts, the Tarbut Foundation, Union Docs Early Production Lab, and numerous individuals.

Chiara No is an American artist, currently living in Johnson, Vermont. She has shown at SpringBreak NYC; MoCA Westport, Westport, CT; Field Projects and Printed Matter Art Book Fair, in New York City and Los Angeles, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; EXILE, Vienna, Austria. No’s work has been featured on Hyperallergic.com and BmoreArt.com. Her work on paper is in the Whitney's Special Collection, the Walker Art Center Library and Archives and the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Library in Chicago. No studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. No currently lives Johnson, Vermont, USA.