What’s outside the frame? A screen sometimes cannot hold the cultural memories and personal histories, and its outside filters in. This series focuses on the offscreen, whether as voiceovers, backstories, or psychology. Within the tradition of screen-based art, it’s the cues that are more than visual which impact audiences most: after all, audience derives from the latinate verb for “hear.” When the offscreen enters the frame, what’s real comes into focus. This series of events took place through the Fall of 2016 in the heart of Soho New York, at 456 Gallery in the Chinese American Arts Council.
Ishu Han, July 19th: Out of Range
Running Time: 43 minutes
The most comprehensive screening of Ishu Han’s work in the United States, whose video work comprises brief gestures that meditate on nationalism, ecology and privacy. The artist Hiroshi Sunairi will introduce his work and moderate a discussion.
Jeamin Cha, August 2nd: Voices and Traces
Running time: 43 minutes
It is not a question but a balloon focuses on a balloon whose slow drift draws the viewer onto an illegal journey to North Korea that politician Sukyung Lim took in 1989. In Autodidact, a Mr. Hur draws on his self-learned knowledge of forensics in an attempt to reconstruct his son’s death. Hysterics, inspired by Heinrich Heine’s poetry, explores a “theater of hysterics.” Lastly, Fog and Smoke mourns urban development through the interlaced movements of a fisherman and a tap-dancer.
Steve Cossman, September 6th: Ritual of Restoration
Running time: 48 minutes
“The world, on both the micro and macro level, is constantly moving within a framework of units this irrepressible flux of time is the nexus of human experience and perception. Investigating the quantification of this motion through a reordering of various elements, I employ universally recognizable imagery within a patterned visual language.” —Steve Cossman
Claudia Bitran, September 21: Credits, Clips, Trailers
Running time: 51 minutes
Real emotion, by turns self-aware and self-forgetful, as we survey the work of Claudia Bitran. As a fan, a critic, and then a fan again, Bitran has de- and reconstructed the icons of the screen with her body and camera. There’s everything from the most visible icons of pop (Britney Spears is back!), to its implied conventions (how different do a Korean horror and a French drama sound?), to its structural supports (what of a movie that’s only credits?
• • •
In Spring of 2016, Claudia Bitran will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Visual Arts of Santiago, Chile. Claudia Bitran recently completed a Skowhegan residency. Her work has been screened in SIMULTAN art festival, Videoholica, ; and her work has also been shown at This Friday or Next Friday, Gallery Project 722, Socrates Sculpture Park, Index Art Center, and Stephan Stoyanov Gallery. She was born in 1986 in Boston, MA, and was raised in Santiago, Chile, where she received her BFA from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica. She earned her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
Jeamin Cha, born in 1986 in South Korea, is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Seoul. She holds degrees from Chelsea College of Design and Arts in London and the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. She has exhibited at DOOSAN gallery and Audiovisual Pavilion, Seoul, Surface Gallery, Nottingham, DMZ Film Festival, Korea, and Rencontres Internationales, Berlin and Paris, among other places.
Steve Cossman is founder and director of Mono No Aware (est. 2007); a non-profit cinema-arts organization whose annual event exhibits the work of contemporary artists that incorporate live film projections and altered light as part of a performance, sculpture or installation. In 2010 he helped the organization establish a series of analog filmmaking workshops that has grown to include an equipment rentals program, a film stock distribution service, an in-person screening series entitled Connectivity Through Cinema and the New York Library of Cinema (NYLoC). Steve’s first major work on film, TUSSLEMUSCLE, earned him Kodak’s Continued Excellence in Filmmaking award at F.L.E.X. and has screened at many festivals and institutions internationally. In 2013, he completed residencies at MoMA PS1’s Expo 1 and the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. In 2014, Brooklyn Magazine named Steve Cossman one of the ‘Top 100 most Influential persons of Brooklyn Culture.’ He has been a visiting artist at Brown University, Dartmouth, the New York Academy of Art, Yale, SAIC, and UPenn. Steve’s recent work on film, W H I T E C A B B A G E (2011-2014), a collaboration with Jahiliyya Fields of L.I.E.S., had its U.S. premiere at Anthology Film Archives. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a director, curator, visual artist, educator and activist.
Ishu Han was born in China and raised in Japan; he now lives and works in Tokyo. His work questions national identity and migration, through a video practice that emphasizes his own peregrinations. This work dispels the myth of Japan as a homogeneous country, allowing a rethinking of belonging, civic duty and agency. Han’s works have been featured in a number of solo exhibitions including Life Scan, Tokyo Frontline, Japan, 2014; Study Country, VCA Gallery, Australia, 2013; Form of Sea, Kyoto Art Center North Gallery, Japan, 2012; as well as groups shows such as In the Wake, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015, and Whose Game is it?, Royal College of Art, UK. Ishu Han just completed a residency sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council.
Born in Hiroshima in 1972, Hiroshi Sunairi had completed three doc film projects; air, about the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Making Mistakes, a travelogue in Tibet and Majulah Singapura about the launching of Tree Project in Singapore. These films have screened at the National Museum of Singapore 2014, cutlog Paris 2013, and numerous festivals. Since 2006, Sunairi has been distributing seeds of trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Sunairi currently working on two documentaries: COSMIC MOVEMENTS – MIHTOTILIZTLI about Mexican Americans practicing the Aztec traditions, and Leur Existence 彼らの存在 about the Hibaku trees and the arborist who takes care of them. As a sculptor, he has shown at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the Queens Museum, and the Japan Society. He teaches in the Art Department at New York University.
