Sights & Sounds: The Jewish Museum New York

New York, NY – The Jewish Museum’s exhibition series Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video concludes with a five-month presentation of highlighted works, featuring one film from each of the 25 participating countries—on view from February 5 to June 30, 2016. As an overview of the series, this presentation will provide a global perspective on the current state of contemporary video art and draw connections between works from opposite ends of the world.

Curated by Jens Hoffmann

A number of works address the constant tension in today’s world between the traditional and the new, as in Studio Revolt + Khmer Arts’ Neang Neak (Serpent Goddess), which juxtaposes contemporary and ancient storytelling techniques. Many works investigate community, as in Regina Parra’s 7,536 Steps (For a Geography of Proximity), which explores the immigrant communities on the outskirts of São Paulo in Brazil; Salomé Lamas’ A Comunidade (The Community), which tells the insular history of the oldest trailer park in Portugal; and Nevin Aladağ’s Hochparterre (Mezzanine), an audio portrait of residents in the diverse Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. Environmental concerns are also addressed in several works, including Ranbir Kaleka’s Forest, which uses the forest as a metaphor for self-knowledge, and Ishu Han’sReturn, a reaction to the devastating 2011 tsunami in eastern Japan that explores humanity’s relationship to the sea.

Politics and history are additional themes that appear throughout. Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan’s Pacta Sunt Servanda (Agreements Must Be Kept) explores Transylvania’s history as a subject of dispute between its resident Romanians and ethnic Hungarians. Eliana Otta’s Refundación (Refounding) imagines the destruction of Peru’s colonial past and its tumultuous political history. Chen Shaoxiong’s Ink Media is a selective documentary based on photographs of recent protests staged around the world. Exterminio (Annihilation) by Edgardo Aragón is a poetic recreation of 1970s military “death flights,” in which traditional drinking gourds are used as stand-ins for murdered rebels and political opponents.

Since November 2013,the Jewish Museum’s Sights and Sounds has presented 100 new works selected by twenty-five curators from around the world, introducing New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context worldwide. Each curator selected new film and video works from their respective regions – including Argentina, Vietnam, Angola, Israel, China, and others. Their selections are screened for one month each in the Museum’s newly refurbished media center, which has been transformed into a miniature cinema. The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience, including spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, and history. A full list of participating curators follows below.