Videos

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Writing History With Lightning

Researching D.W. Griffith’s deeply troubling film in the wake of recent events led to the creation of Writing History With Lightning. The Parkway Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland at the intersection of Charles Street and North, was erected a century ago, in 1915––the same year Birth of a Nation was released. This highly controversial film made it to the Parkway the following year and was screened again, years later. The Parkway Theatre now sits derelict, and the uprising that followed the death of Freddie Gray spilled onto its doorstep a full century after Birth of a Nation hit American cinema screens. To produce Writing History. a series of tableau from Birth of a Nation were modified and looped, then projected onto the interior surfaces of the Parkway Theatre. These projections spill across architectural details, theater seats, and discarded objects from the building’s past, merging physical structure with social structure. Filming these new projections and the dark and time-ravaged surroundings of the theater space resulted in this new, single-screen work. Footage was gathered over the course of several film shoots and treated in post-production in a way that reverses the racist structure of Birth of a Nation. Isolated from the film’s original narrative, the mythological presentation of white characters as the embodiment of American virtue (nobility, beauty, bravery, heroism, wisdom, loyalty, civility) are destabilized. Griffith’s dehumanizing depictions African Americans are challenged through the treatment of both the archival footage before it was projected inside the Parkway and after it was recorded and edited. The original recorded score of Birth of a Nation was deeply manipulated to produce Writing History’s soundtrack.
Added on: July 10, 2016

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Vanitas MMXVlll

Mapped architectural projection at The National Hotel, Miami Beach, December 2018. Hironaka & Suib continue the centuries-old tradition of the vanitas still life in their massive projection titled Vanitas MMXVlll. Here, common still-life motifs are completely unmoored from their tabletop arrangement. Bruised, molding and half-eaten fruit, broken glass and mirror, wilting flowers and skulls tumble slowly upwards. Vanitas MMXVlll destabilizes the traditional still life motifs to reflect our current cultural moment, where formerly stable institutions that once embodied shared values are undermined while pride and avarice have been elevated to virtues.
Added on: April 1, 2019

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The Continuous Moment, Part 1

The Continuous Moment Part 1, 2014, imagines a dystopia in which the proposal for a “continuous monument” by a 1960s radical Italian architectural collective has been realized on a global scale. The result is disastrous: Corporate-style glass walls stretch around the world, perverting a critical idea into a hegemonic structure. An adjacent video, Routine Maintenance, 2014, shows a lone window-washer cleaning the monument’s mirrored surface. Thanks to the internal mechanism of the video loop, he toils under the sun of a workday that is only ever just getting started. -Katherine Rochester, Artforum
Added on: April 1, 2019