Doc Talk: The Upper Room + Specular Fiction with Coleman Collins

Please join us for a screening and Q&A with interdisciplinary artist Coleman Collins to discuss his video works Specular Fiction and The Upper Room.

Primarily derived from 3D scans of objects, and with a particular focus on digital replicas of West African architectural sites, Specular fiction (2024) is a short, speculative narrative video that traces the complex relationships between seemingly dichotomous terms: original and copy; object and image; real and virtual space. In an imagined future of indeterminate distance, the objects of the world have been destroyed, leaving only the mirror-world of their digital replicas behind. The upper room (2025) traces the often destructive effects of mimetic desire through a narrative video essay that weaves together fact and speculative fiction.  Drawing parallels between diasporic fantasies of return, gospel music, and 19th-century projects of nation-state building, The upper room examines the ways in which both real and imagined spaces are collectively produced.

Shown here together, the two works are part of the artist’s ongoing research into the resonances between notions of diaspora and technological methods of transmission, copying, and reiteration.

Program Duration: 37 min

About the Artist

Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Collins is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. He has also received support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He received an MFA from UCLA in 2018, and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. In 2019, he participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions and screenings have taken place at e-flux, New York; Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles; Herald Street, London; Soldes, Los Angeles; the Palestine Festival of Literature, Jerusalem/Ramallah; Larder, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; Brief Histories, New York; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. 

Please join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor of Media Studies.