Saturday, November 10 at 8 PM

Doors 7:30; FREE EVENT

This free screening is part of ACTION! Cinema as Connection, a free series presenting political documentary films and workshops. Curated by Penelope Uribe-Abee, ACTION! is made possible with the support of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Archives are not repositories of historical knowledge but sites of loss, erasure, and silence. In “Archival Futurisms: Memory and the Ruins of Imperialism” Michelle Dizon will explore the politics of archives through her most recent large-scale multi-image slide, video, and sound installation, entitled The Archive’s Fold. Dizon will contextualize The Archive’s Fold in the visual genealogies of imperialism, situate the work in her larger practice, and offer archival futurism as a realm of intimacy between the dead, the living, and the still to be born– part of a larger project of liberation and an anticolonial claim to the past from the future. FREE EVENT!

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. The violence of imperialism and the intimate spaces of resistance within globalization form central pivots in her work which take the form of multi-channel video installations, multi-image slide projection, expanded cinema performances, essay films, photographs, discursive events, pedagogical platforms, and writing.

Dizon’s recent projects include Gaza Before the Law, a film about failure of the US legal system in matters of justice for Palestine, The Archive’s Fold, a multi-image slide installation that explores the violence of the US colonial archive by reading its images through seven generations of women in Dizon’s family, and White Gaze (with Viet Le), an artist’s book and photographic installation that poses a decolonial counterpoint to National Geographic and its legacy of imperialist visuality.  Past projects of note include Perpetual Peace, a multichannel video installation about extractivism and ecological disaster in the Philippines, Basing Landscapes, a single-channel video installation about the gendered violence of neocolonial occupation, and Civil Society, a three-channel video installation that considers cultural memory through the lens of two events: the 2005 uprisings in the French banlieues and the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles. Organizing and autonomous community building is central to Dizon’s aesthetic and political practice and she is the founder of at land’s edge, an autonomous decolonial initiative focused on nurturing the voices of artists of color in East and South Los Angeles.  

Dizon has exhibited and lectured across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East at venues such as the Center for Women’s Studies (Zagreb, Croatia), Sursock Museum (Beirut, Lebanon), Caixaforum (Barcelona, Spain), Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark), Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), IASPIS (Stockholm, Sweden), Salasab (Bogotá, Colombia), Sumaryo Art Space (Jakarta, Indonesia), Vargas Museum (Manila, Philippines), Para/site Art Space (Hong Kong, China), Mind Set Art (Taipei, Taiwan), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, United States), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, United States), and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, United States).  

Dizon has been honored with a Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles and with grants from Art Matters, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Human Rights Center. The relevance of her artistic practice to has been recognized in dissertations, scholarly books, and articles.  She earned an MFA in Art with specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley.

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