Category: DOC TALKS

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.

Please join us for a screening and Q&A with Firat Yücel and belit sağ to discuss their filmmaker-group project Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto) Censorship on March 23rd at 1pm at Kellen Auditorium.

A group of filmmakers and artists from Turkey collaborated to create videos on “(auto)censorship”, in response to the increasingly repressive climate in Turkey. The result is Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)censorship, a collective reflection on the limits of freedom of expression. Six videos intertwined with each other, reframing the history of censorship from the perspective of those who experienced it. Through diverse forms – desktop documentaries, video essays, photography, letters, chats, reenactments and CCTV footage – Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship revisits recent histories of censorship from the perspective of those who have lived them. From prison writings and unsent letters to unfinished documentaries and a painting barred from print, the anthology explores a central question of filmmaking: to show, or not to show.

Following the screening, filmmakers will join remotely via Zoom for the Q&A

Program Duration: 66 min

About the Filmmakers

Fırat Yücel is a documentary director, producer, and editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul. He curates the Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema video series supporting political filmmakers at risk and is affiliated with the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR). His work focuses on collective filmmaking and resistance to censorship, often using video-essay, archival/found footage, and desktop-documentary forms. His films include Welcome Lenin (2016), Only Blockbusters Left Alive (2016), Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater (2016), Head and Tails (2018), March 8, 2020: A Memoir (2020), and the award-winning Translating Ulysses (2023, co-directed with Aylin Kuryel). He was a fellow at BAK Utrecht’s Fellowship for Situated Practice (2023–2024).

belit sağ (she/they) is a visual artist, researcher, and educator who studied mathematics in Ankara and audiovisual arts and comparative literature in Amsterdam. A former resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and the International Studio & Curatorial Program (NYC), her research-based practice explores visual representations of political violence and migration histories. Her current project, Remembering Otherwise, examines the labor struggle of the first group of migrant women from Turkey to unionize in the Netherlands. She has presented work internationally, including at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, documenta14, MOCA Taipei, Eye Filmmuseum, and major film festivals such as Rotterdam, Toronto, and New York.

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.

Please join us for a special screening of short films that bring together a range of contemporary voices exploring the everyday, the poetic, and the political in African life through the moving image on November 3rd at 1pm at Kellen Auditorium.

The program is selected and curated by Christian Nyampeta, who will join us for a conversation following the screening.

Presented in collaboration with The African Film Institute, this screening is part of a growing effort to cultivate a sustained and intimate engagement with African cinema in New York. 

The African Film Institute aims to create a home and a place of intimacy with African cinema in New York, through developing gradually and organically a viewing program animated by fellowships; a growing library; an active writers’ room; and an expanding catalog of recorded dialogues. The African Film Institute draws from the visual cultures that view cinema as an evening school: a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination—employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods informed by different uses of time, visual and textual histories, and social struggles and hopes in mutuality between their own locality and the world at large. 

Program Duration: 70 min

About the Curator

Christian Nyampeta is an artist living in New York, where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta convenes the Nyanza Working Group of ARAC — Another Roadmap School, which participated in documenta fifteen, and he is the convener of Boda Boda Lounge 2022–24, a trans-African film and video art festival. His recent exhibitions include the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2024), Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); Dakar Biennale Dak’Art, Dakar, Senegal (2018); 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) and Risquons-Tout, WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium (2021). Nyampeta was awarded the European Union Prize at the 12th Bamako Encounters — African Biennial of Photography in 2019.

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.