Opening Reception: Saturday, 10 September 2022 from 2 to 4 pm
Elemental Cinema brings together the collaborative film works of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. In this series of films, the four elements – water, earth, fire, air – inform the artists’ considerations of an entangled existence, and of time and value that reimagine knowledge and existence “otherwise.” This exhibition includes installations of their films to date: Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy (2019) and Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum (2020), as well as archives related to the films.
In the films, the composition and decomposition of the world is structured through the elements. They are fractal compositions, interfacing between the quantic, organic, historic and cosmic, drawing from visual arts, sciences and philosophy. The works edit together footage of both micro and macro landscapes, animation and archival documentation through references that range from quantum mechanics, the blues, diverse philosophies, classical physics, colonial theory to cartomancy. The intellectual and sensorial experience of the works across scale, surface and perspectives demands an assessment of how subjectivity is constructed, how we come to know and ways to unsettle that knowledge through a polyrhythmic entanglement that displaces hierarchies of rational experience.
How can we understand existence other than from the post-Enlightenment notions of nature and world? How can we approach all that exists without prioritizing the subject (Man, the I, or subjectivity)? Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s work builds on their combined research and Ferreira da Silva’s planetary view of the world as plenum (corpus infinitum), a complex terrain in which human, geological, bacterial and meteorological environments are not independent forms and phenomena. As experiments in entanglement and ways of “the Thinking of the World,” Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s work proposes alternatives to the destructive consequences of the Western mind. What does it mean to disorder Western thinking? What other ways of knowing – across cultures, time, space and form – can we learn/relearn? The work takes up the long emergency of colonialism and capitalism, raising questions of ecology, extraction, territory, slavery, sovereignty and migrancy through an intersection of colonialism, race and aesthetics. In doing so, the works question how structures of power and categorizations of difference generate rifts between humans, and with the more-than-human, the earth and the cosmos.
Upcoming Programs
Throughout the exhibition, join us for midday dialogues with UBC scholars, artists, curators and critics. In this Conversations series, we invite two prominent, disciplinarily distinct voices into the gallery to discuss productive intersections of their own work with Elemental Cinema, followed by a discussion that includes the audience.
Elemental Cinema is framed by a two-part symposium – the first taking place in Oaxaca, Mexico in early September and the second at the Belkin in December. We invite you to join the artists in urgent discussions with land and water defenders, language-preservation scholars, activists and curators for a fulsome immersion into the most pressing concerns put forward by the exhibition and our shared global experience of radical precarity.
In December, we are pleased to welcome back the UBC Contemporary Players for a concert in the gallery inspired by the exhibition. Directed by Paolo Bortolussi, the ensemble includes graduate and undergraduate students focusing on music and performance of our time. Programs blend masterworks by internationally acclaimed composers with exciting world premieres of works written expressly for the ensemble by UBC composition majors.
For tours of Elemental Cinema for groups and classes, contact Naomi Sawada (naomi.sawada@ubc.ca).
Archives
The archives presented at the Belkin are related to 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy and Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum and expand the films through texts, audio, video interviews and other media. These sources delve further into subjecthood, identity politics and representation in cultural practice to form additional facets of interface for myriad ways of thinking of and acting in the world. When presented at CCA Glasgow in 2021, the artists compiled a corresponding online archive for Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum that can be accessed here.
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Elemental Cinema: Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman is curated by Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.
