This program presents recent works by Dicky Bahto, Gelare Khoshgozaran, and Mona Varichon that incorporate personal, everyday experiences through diaristic filmmaking, found images, sounds, and texts to address the way we connect with others in art, action, protest, and poetry.
Mark Toscano of Los Angeles Filmforum says of Bahto’s films: “His varied and complex engagement with moving image and photographic media is steeped in a deeply felt humanity and empathy, manifesting through his inspired photographic eye and frequently direct interaction with and appreciation of the material vitality of film and cinema. His films achieve heightened emotional states of great intimacy and poetry, often channeling the uniquely aleatory qualities of film to carry a sensuality and spirituality hovering in the space between loving depiction and vaporous abstraction.”
Chris Fite-Wassilak says of Khoshgozaran’s work: “Through its levelling of fact and its attendant fictions, of dream and protest, Khoshgozaran’s work enacts a particular form of contemporary storytelling: wary of the essay film’s tendency for narration, which enacts a simplification or occlusion of sorts; but one that is equally wary of documentary’s voyeuristic and othering tendencies, what writer and filmmaker Fatimah Tobing Rony has called ‘fascinating cannibalism’. It is dispersed, subjective documentary that follows on from the work of practitioners like Trinh T. Minh-ha and finds echoes in contemporaries like Ana Vaz and Rehana Zaman. Khoshgozaran attempts a destabilised, critical and oneiric pulling away from the photographic document, mapping the effects on the mind of the globally dispersed forever war, and asking where we might go from here.”
Marion Vasseur Raluy says of Varichon’s: “Her works – whose approach can be compared to that of fan art – are certainly tributes to various personalities that she admires, from her mother to Assa Traoré. In this alternation between popular public figures and anonymous individuals, she tries to understand their motivations and desires by revealing their mechanisms of struggle as well as their political opinions. From English to French, from the private to the public sphere, or even social networks, Varichon produces video collages that make it possible to ‘make people speak’ and ‘make them hear’ differently. In this way she is reviving a heritage that has partly disappeared: that of beginning with the voices of others rather than her own.”
Dicky Bahto and Mona Varichon will both be present for a discussion / Q&A after the screening
program includes (not in order):
Dicky Bahto – A play in black and white (2022) Super 8 to video, 17 minutes
A few years ago my baba asked me to “make a film dedicated to him, about him, starring him.” I’ve finally fulfilled his request. Built around a reel of Super 8 home movie footage I made while playing backgammon with him, the film takes visual and conceptual motifs from the game itself and elaborates on them in a series of visual variations.
Dicky Bahto – six pages from a diary (2021) 13.5 minutes, Super 8mm
A film made from diary material collected between Christmas Eve 2019 in Paris and mid-November 2020 in Los Angeles, including a dolma-making lesson I gave to a friend, summer fruits under wildfire skies, and the street celebrations after the 2020 presidential election. Aside from the first minute, which has a collage of sound and music made by Tashi Wada and Julia Holter, all sound by Dicky Bahto; additional camera by Patrick Londen; with appearances by Faith Chang, Julia Holter, Patrick Londen, Tashi Wada, and Canela, Francis, & Katoosh.
Gelare Khoshgozaran – To Keep the Mountain at Bay (2023) Super 8 to video, 9.5 minutes
Using poetry and prose excerpts with footage shot in California and Caucasus Mountains, To Keep the Mountain at Bay is an homage to Etel Adnan. Through fragmented images and words the film attempts to map exile as a potential space of collectivity and transnational solidarity, against the passivity of nostalgia and assimilationist propaganda.
Gelare Khoshgozaran – Men of My Dreams (2020) Super 8 to video, 9.5 minutes
A poetic reflection on the artist’s exile that connects Tehran with Los Angeles, Men of My Dreams unfolds a series of vignettes that toy with the unstable ground between dream and reality. Treating the past as materially present in fragments of knowledge carried by the body, it delves into the artist’s personal history while seeking the idea of home in the lineage of antifascist thought, poetry, and activism.
Mona Varichon – 2k19 Weather Diaries ou La météo du monde d’avant (2022) 28 minutes
Part of Varichon’s ongoing Insta Stories Archive series, in which she uses the Instagram stories of strangers to recreate in real time events ranging from the world historic to the banal from multiple perspectives. Made with a wink to George Kuchar’s Weather Diaries, Varichon traces her movement and personal experiences through the videos of others, with the idea of weather as drama a recurrent motif, creating a self-reflective and personal diary entirely from the disposable videos of others.
bios:
Dicky Bahto lives in San Francisco. He has exhibited work utilizing still and motion picture photography, sound, and performance at a variety of museums, galleries, microcinemas, film festivals, conferences, alternative spaces, and scenic locations spanning the Northern Hemisphere, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to a series of nooks, crannies, and underbrush along and under Sunset Boulevard. Recent projects include a 72-minute long film, For Liz Harris, which accompanied several live performances by Grouper on her winter 2022 tour in Europe and the United States; a video performance of Mieko Shiomi’s Mirror Piece commissioned by The Getty; an on-going multimedia collaboration with pianist Lolita Emmanuel exploring the relationship between traditional and contemporary practices in Assyrian visual and musical arts; and he is currently working on a three-hour long film to accompany a performance by Sarah Davachi at MOMA in New York this coming September. He has a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (RIP) and an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. He currently teaches in the film department at the California College of the Arts.
Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence. Gelare uses film and video to explore narratives of belonging outside of the geographies and temporalities that have both unsettled our sense of home, and make our places of affinity uninhabitable. Gelare has presented her work internationally, with current and upcoming exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, MASS Moca, and the Delfina Foundation in London. With a BA in Photography from University of Arts in Tehran (2009), and an MFA from University of Southern California (2011), Gelare lives and works in Los Angeles.
Mona Varichon lives and works in Paris. She received her MFA from ArtCenter College of Design (Pasadena, CA) in 2018. She wonders where and for whom artworks live, and whether her work can exist online or in a community before it exists in a gallery or museum. She recently presented performances at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) and the Capc musée d’art contemporain (Bordeaux, France), and her work has been exhibited at Les Urbaines Festival (Lausanne, Switzerland), Alienze (Vienna, Austria), the Sifang Art Museum Satellite (Shanghai, China), the National Gallery (Prague, Czech Republic), Cocotte (Treignac, France), Balice Hertling (Paris, France), and in Los Angeles at The Vanity Gallery, in lieu, the Redcat Theatre, the Echo Park Film Center, and The Egyptian Theater. She was recently a resident at Laura Owens’s Studio of the South in Arles, France and is currently translating to French the memoirs of American artists George and Mike Kuchar.