Presentation @ CRITICAL FORUM CORK

In partnership with aemi and Critical Forum Dublin, Critical Forum Cork is a new initiative for 2019. It is a discussion group for artists, critics and curators who have an investment in the future of the moving image. It is a space for criticality and debate in a mutually supportive environment and in dialogue Critical Forum groups in Dublin and across the UK.

The forum will take place once every two months at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork and is supported by LUX and aemi, a platform that supports & exhibits artist and experimental moving image in Ireland. Michael Holly and I are the current moderators.

This Friday, March 1st we will have our inaugural meeting. Aoife Desmond and I will be giving the first presentations:

Aoife Desmond is a Cork based artist who works with film, performance and other media. She also writes, lectures, curates and works collaboratively. aoifedesmond.com

Aoife will present a performative interaction/investigation into the work of Maya Deren, Maya Deren is well known for her experimental film works such as 'Meshes of the Afternoon' which explore a fusion of dance and film ‘choreocinema’ and continue a Surrealist interest in fragmentations of identity and the unconscious. This interaction will focus particularly on her film ’Divine Horsemen’ an atypical work edited and screened after her death that acts as a record of her immersion and ethnographic study into Voodoo dance rituals on the island of Haiti. 

Maximilian Le Cain is a Cork-based experimental filmmaker and writer. He often makes films with Vicky Langan and is affiliated with Experimental Film Society.  experimentalfilmsociety.com

Max will present an introduction to the ‘cinematic parenthesis’ of Italian theatre maker and provocateur Carmelo Bene. Although hailed by Gillles Deleuze and other influential writers as a major contribution to modern cinema, Bene’s radically experimental film work remains underappreciated. This presentation will argue for the uniqueness of these films and explain how they remain an unexploded timebomb in film aesthetics even a half-century after they were made.