Curated by: Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak
Wednesday, October 29th, 6:30pm - 8:30pm
School of Visual Arts
TICKETS
Bonding Humanity: Assemblies in Motion screening program brings together artists and filmmakers who explore the fragile and shifting ties that shape how we live together — in public and private, in memory and in movement. Inspired by the poetic, fragmented language of the essay film — and its ability to hold both intimate reflections and structural critique — the program imagines cinema as a gathering ground: a space where personal archives, fictional gestures, political ghosts, and speculative futures co-inhabit.
Rather than follow a singular narrative, the screening unfolds as a collective murmuration — assembling works that reflect on how we come together, drift apart, remember, resist, and rebuild. These films stretch across disciplines and approaches, yet share a commitment to the aesthetic and ethical practices of bonding — across silences, distances, ruptures, and shifting perceptions of time. Here, time doesn’t flow linearly; it moves diagonally, circles back, or plunges downward — bending and folding memory and experience into new shapes.
The program features multigenerational voices in filmmaking, each engaging with what it means to hold onto love, place, memory, and possibility. Nina Bačun’s Bonding Humanity (Perhaps Manifesto), having its New York premiere, reconfigures fragments of New Yugoslav cinema into a poetic inquiry on the afterlives of collective space, setting the curatorial tone for the program. This gesture of assembling the scattered resonates across the works: in Anna Kipervaser’s Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий // Grandma Galya and Grandpa Arkadiy, a dreamy rumination on love and the passage of time, and the objects — physical or emotional — we cling to in order to stay tethered to home and self; in Basim Magdy’s My Father Looks for an Honest City, where a lone figure — his father — wanders the stark outskirts of Cairo, searching for honesty with a lamp in daylight, as stray dogs, petrified wood, and artificial trees become unlikely witnesses in a poetic search for meaning; in Jyoti Mistry’s Loving in Between, where the act of loving becomes a form of resistance — pushing back against the political, religious, and cultural forces that dictate who and how we are allowed to love; in Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story, a haunting reflection on a city marked by invisible histories, where the image of a wig becomes a phantom limb — a disembodied witness that moves across borders and temporalities; and in Lily Jue Sheng’s Heritage Architecture, where a shift from labor organizing to landscape cinema traces the quiet contours of memory embedded in built environments.
Across these works, cinema becomes a method of reconstruction and reimagining — of finding form within fragmentation. Assemblies in Motion invites viewers to dwell in the in-between — where memory slips, space resists closure, and images carry the quiet resonance of what once was, and the echo of what might still become.
