Name: Bonding Humanity: Assemblies in Motion
Start: 2025-10-29T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-10-29T20:30:00-04:00
Location: SVA MFA Photo, Video and Related Media (Big Room 120)

Curated by: Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak
About this Event

Bonding Humanity: Assemblies in Motion is a curated screening program bringing 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.

Following the screening there will be a Q&A session with the filmmakers.

---- Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak

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Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist working in experimental and documentary film in both 16mm and digital video. Her practice engages themes including ecology, colonialism, perception, and embodiment, with a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes. Her films have screened at Crossroads, Slamdance, Full Frame, Process Experimental Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Prismatic Ground, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and many others. Her practice also extends into classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, and basements. Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Canyon Cinema, and Alchemiya.

Basim Magdy is an artist and filmmaker whose films have screened at the Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, IFF Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, and Curtas Vila do Conde, among others. His recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern, Röda Sten Konsthall (Gothenburg), M HKA (Antwerp), MAAT (Lisbon), MCA (Chicago), MAXXI (Rome), and Jeu de Paume (Paris). His work has also featured in group shows at MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Castello di Rivoli (Turin), and Palais de Tokyo (Paris). His works are held in numerous public collections, including MoMA, Guggenheim (New York), Centre Pompidou, Fondation Louis Vuitton, MAXXI, National Gallery of Canada, and the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher born in China and based in Amsterdam. He holds a Master’s in Physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a Master’s in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, New York. His works have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the MoMA (New York), IFFR (Rotterdam), CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) among many others. He was a fellow at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (2013) and participated in Berlinale Talents (2014). His film Many Undulating Things (2019), co-directed with Pan Lu, premiered at Visions du Réel. His recent film An Asian Ghost Story (2023) received multiple awards, including the New:Vision at CPH:DOX, Golden Dove at DOKLeipzig, Grand Prix André S. Labarthe at Entrevue Belfort, Arkipel Award at Arkipel, and some others. He currently teaches at LUCAS, Leiden University.

Jyoti Mistry is Professor in Film at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Her work spans fiction, documentary, and installation, often using film as a research methodology. Her recent films include Loving in Between (2023), which premiered at Locarno, and Cause of Death (2020), which premiered at Berlinale. Her current research focuses on Indigenous Sámi education within Sweden’s colonial history. She was Editor-in-Chief of PARSE (Platform for Artistic Research in Sweden) from 2021–2024, and her recent publications include Transversal Entanglement – Artistic Research in Film and Decolonising Film Education. She received the CILECT Teaching Award (2016) and Sweden’s FilmForm Prize (2022). From August 2024 to September 2025, she is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at SOAS, University of London.

Lily Jue Sheng is an artist-filmmaker, organizer, and cinema worker from Shanghai and NJ/NYC (Lenapehoking), working across moving image, collage, and poetry. . Their films have screened at venues including Anthology Film Archives, The Cinematheque, Light Field Film Festival, Mono No Aware, and the Emily Harvey Foundation. Recent festival presentations include the International Film Festival Rotterdam, RIDM (Montreal), Beijing International Short Film Festival, and Winnipeg Underground Festival. They are a recipient of awards and fellowships from Creatives Rebuild NY, the Jerome Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and various state and local arts councils.

Nina Bačun is a designer, researcher, educator, and filmmaker whose interdisciplinary work spans set, book, and exhibition design, as well as conceptual and speculative practices. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Zagreb, focusing on the intersection of cinema and architecture. Her films have screened at festivals such as Oberhausen, Go Short, FILMADRID, and 25 FPS (2022, 2023), and she has presented work at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Future Architecture Platform, and KISD (Cologne). Her research explores how cinematic techniques influence spatial perception and suggest that cinema can be approached as a critical and generative medium for architecture.

Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak is a visual artist, filmmaker, and educator invested in the moving image, performative archival practices, and countercultural histories. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Encounters Biennial 2025: Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales (Timișoara), the 17th Gjon Mili Biennial at the National Gallery of Kosovo, the MoMA (New York), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), Reading International Art Festival (UK), Anonymous Gallery (New York), AIR Gallery (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), Gallery Augusta (Helsinki), Gallery of SESI (São Paulo). Her latest film Stitch the Ruin has been screened at over twenty international festivals and received multiple awards. She has participated in Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (NYC), the Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY), the Fondazione Pistoletto Residency (Italy), MuseumsQuartier (Vienna), Recess Session (NYC), A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship Program (NYC), and Alserkal Avenue (Dubai). Awards include, Green DCP at the 25 FPS (Zagreb), the NYFA Film/Video Finalist, the Residency Unlimited & NEA Fellowship, the Paula Rhodes Award (NYC), and the 2024 Ruprecht Fellowship at the University of Vermont. Željka holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.