Common Exchanges: When Species Meet Film Screening

This program brings together short films and social media videos that attend to inter-species encounters between humans and other-than-human life. With works by Francis Alÿs, Joelle Mercedes, Minyong Jang, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and additional artists and content creators, the exchanges expressed vary from fiercely ordinary to curiously uncommon.

“Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? And, how is “becoming with” a practice of becoming worldly?” theorist Donna Haraway asks in her book When Species Meet. Organized by MFA candidate Lisa Marie Malloy and artist Liyan Zhao, this film program is guided by Harraway’s question and focuses on how attunement to these exchanges can be a productive practice of “becoming worldly.”

ABOUT

Liyan Zhao is an artist working primarily in moving image. Her practice, rooted in ecological concerns, looks at the ways that our intimate knowledge of the world is embodied and passed on between individuals, between species, and across generations. Working alongside human and more-than-human collaborators, her relational experiments in attention and collectivity ask us to acknowledge our shared implication in a climate reality filled with both grief and wonder, striving for glimpses of resilience and the understanding that living in nature is both shared work and art. She holds an MFA from Yale University and is currently obtaining her MFA in Cinematic Arts from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Lisa Marie Malloy is an artist devoted to engaged modes of filmmaking. Her first feature-length film, A Shape of Things to Come (2020), premiered at CPH:DOX and has since shown around the world at venues such as NYC Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real. Her second film, The Raw and the Cooked (2022), premiered at Cinéma du Réel . She is currently obtaining her MFA from University of Illinois Chicago.

ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free and open to the public. For questions and access accommodations, email [email protected].

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Gallery 400, 400 South Peoria Street, Chicago, United States