The Memory of a Memory is part of Prismatic Ground, a festival centered on experimental documentary, and is co-presented by Triple Canopy. The screening will feature Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne’s Three Songs without Z, an adaptation of “Four Songs without Z,” which the duo created with Zakaria Almoutlak for Triple Canopy’s twenty-seventh issue, Unknown States. The work is a portrait of Almoutlak, a sculptor and media activist from Homs, Syria, who fled the civil war in 2015. Three Songs without Z will be presented alongside Camila Galaz’s Vecino Vecino (2021), Younes Ben Slimane’s We Knew How Beautiful They Were, These Islands (2022), Miatta Kawinzi’s SHE GATHER ME (2021), and Kamila Kuc’s What We Shared (2021). The screening of Three Songs without Z will be followed by a conversation with Pandian and the film critic and scholar Yasmina Price.
Prismatic Ground will take place virtually and in person—at Maysles Documentary Center as well as the Museum of the Moving Image and Anthology Film Archives—from May 4 to 8. Visit Prismatic Ground to view the complete program.
- Karthik Pandian is an artist who works in exhibitions and public interventions to unsettle the ground of history. He uses moving image, sculpture, and performance to render the mythologies of the present through forgotten, fragmentary, and futuristic pasts. Pandian has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), Bétonsalon (Paris), and Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis). His work has been featured in numerous survey exhibitions, including the first edition of “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); “La Triennale: Intense Proximity” at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris); and “Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015,” at Whitechapel Gallery (London). He is currently working on a series of temporary public artworks in Boston and Minneapolis, which can be followed on Twitter via @videocommune. Pandian teaches in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
- Andros Zins-Browne is a choreographer who works at the intersection of installation, performance, and dance. He is a proponent of “expanded” choreography: extending choreographic notions into work with non-dancers, singers, texts, and objects. Considerations of the interactions between materiality and immateriality are central to his work, most recently his work with voice. His performances have been presented at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (London); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City); Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai); and the Fondation Galeries Lafayette (Paris). His ongoing collaboration with Karthik Pandian, Atlas Unlimited, addresses movement, destruction, and reconstruction through sculpture and performance, and has been presented at Performa 19 (New York City), Netwerk Aalst (Brussels), 80WSE (New York City), and the Logan Center (Chicago). Zins-Browne is the recipient of grants and awards from the Goethe Institute, the Flemish Cultural Ministry, NYSCA, and, with Pandian, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
- Yasmina Price is a writer, researcher, and programmer. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. She has interviewed filmmakers, spoken about Black film and revolutionary cultural production, and programmed screenings for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Maysles Documentary Center, International Documentary Association, New York Film Festival, and more. Her writing has been published in Film Quarterly, Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Vulture, Hyperallergic, Aperture, and Art in America. She is a PhD student at Yale University.
- Prismatic Ground is a festival centered on experimental documentary. The inaugural edition took place in 2021, in partnership with Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate, with support from Canyon Cinema, Icarus Films, Video Data Bank, and Microscope Gallery.