Joseph’s artistic work in the short film medium is given a film installation exhibit at the New Museum, New York City.
Genre: Film, Exhibition
Venue: New Museum, New York City, USA
Time: September 27 2017 till January 7 2018
Curators & Sponsors: Curated by Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director. Produced in collaboration with the Vinyl Factory. Additional support from Marciano Art Foundation and Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund. Installation design and production by Commonwealth Projects. Audio and sound by Funktion-One, Sound Investment, Halofix, and Dr. Gil Soulodre.
Artist: Kahlil Joseph, American filmmaker, music video director, and video artist, known for creating intellectually and emotionally dense short films that center on the experience of African Americans in the United States. Numerous solo and duo exhibitions and screenings at major film festivals (resulting in Grand Jury Prize for Short Films at 2013 Sundance). Emmy nomination for co-direction of Beyonce’s Lemonade. Recipient of a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a 2017 Los Angeles Artadia Award.
Description: In “Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play,” his first solo presentation in New York, Joseph debuts Fly Paper (2017), a new film installation that draws from his admiration of photographer and artist Roy DeCarava (1919–2009) to bring together a range of film and digital footage contemplating themes of filiation, influence, and legacy as well as dimensions of the past, present, and future within a community of black artists, writers, actors, and musicians who call Harlem and New York City home. Joseph’s also marks a personal reckoning with the city through his late father, whom he cared for in Harlem at the end of his life.
Through references to literature and narration, Fly Paper also probes the ways in which the literary imagination parallels that of film and how the ordinary act of storytelling shapes larger histories and enduring myths. Fly Paper also expands Joseph’s practice into sound, unfolding a complex acoustic environment in which sonic textures and original compositions resonate throughout the exhibition space. As a rich and polyphonic portrait of black art and culture in New York City, Fly Paper invites a meditation on the slippery nature of memory, reverie, and the photographic image.
For more information, see the exhibition site here.
