Performative Screenings #63: Mary Helena Clark, Disagreeable Body

29.10.2019 - 07.12.2019

school, Wien / Österreich

A disagreeable body is at odds with itself. Its guts are contested places. Its boundaries are drawn and redrawn. There is one fantasy of a contained and statically defined body. The subject and property of a separate ruling mind, sealed off from the contaminating excess of everything outside of it. There is another fantasy of rupture, a porous, sensing body dispersed and dissociated. This one runs the schizo-utopian gamut - as Roger Caillois writes in Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia “... the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of [her] skin and occupies the other side of [her] senses.... [She] tries to look at [herself] from any point whatever in space. [She] feels [herself] becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put …” This program looks at these fantasies and accompanying anxieties. A body’s fraught apertures and the othered self; the mechanisms of a body, expressive and productive; a body as an ecology with climates, landscapes, and residents; and as a base political unit - an enfleshed machine producing labor and waste.

The Glass Note, 2018, Mary Helena Clark, 9’

Outside, 2017, Beny Wagner, 14’

Untitled (Meisner Technique), Mary Helena Clark, 2014, 4’

Bright Moments (excerpt), 1975, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, 4’

Disagreeable Body, 2019, Josh Minkus, lecture performance, 15’

Telemetry I, (work in progress), Mary Helena Clark, 9’


Another screening with works by Mary Helena Clark will take place Saturday, December 7, 5 pm

By foot-candle light, 2011, 9'
Sound Over Water, 2009, 6'
The Dragon is the Frame, 2014, 14'
Orpheus (outtakes), 2012, 6'
Palms, 2015, 9'
Delphi Falls, 2017, 20'



Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Recent presentations include a solo exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2019); "Unboxing: Doublespeak," Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019), "A Casual Pincer," AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles (2019), "Audible Bacillus," Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan (2019), and "Ligature," DOCUMENT, Chicago (2018). Her films have screened at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Images Festival, and Hong Kong International Film Festival, among others.


In cooperation with Schule Friedl Kubelka für unabhängigen Film




[Quelle: Einladung]