This moving film is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and the body memories that each carries. In January 2020, New York-based interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen during the Cultural Revolution. They had planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly cut off Eiko’s visit and made Wen’s visit to the USA impossible. Nevertheless, the collaboration continued. Looking back on the video diaries they had filmed without a script, Eiko and Wen continued their dialogue on Zoom, sharing past works that form a deeper understanding of their circumstantial differences and characteristic similarities. The pair will be in residence at MASS MoCA developing a new collaborative work.

|

Tweet

In 2019, Iceland constructed the first memorial to mark the death of its Okjökull glacier. Since then, funerals have been held around the world to mark the melting of glacier bodies. These rituals of collective grief amplify the current state of climate emergency while expressing the intimate entanglement of human and environmental well-being.

Consisting of an experimental documentary film and a photographic installation, Ohan Breiding’s Belly of a Glacier connects this act of mourning to ongoing practices of preservation that strive to protect the ice — a material that contains both remnants of the past and the conditions of a future world. Breiding captures the efforts of the residents of Obergoms, Switzerland, to drape the nearby Rhône Glacier with thermal blankets to insulate it from rising temperatures. Despite these hope-filled actions of ecological care, scientists predict the Rhône will have fully melted by 2050.

|

Tweet