Artists’ Cinema Today

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Monday, June 1, 2026 at 7pm for Artists’ Cinema Today, a screening and conversation organized together with the Brooklyn Film Festival. The program presents a selection of artists’ films by Basim Magdy, Agnieszka Polska, Hiwa K, Maryam Tafakory, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and Shana Moulton,alongside the recipient of the e-flux Honorary Mention from this year’s festival.

Artists’ cinema today does not operate as an extension of the film industry, nor as a marginal supplement to it. It has developed as a parallel system within contemporary moving-image culture, with its own forms of production, exhibition, circulation, and public discussion. This event offers an occasion to think about artists’ films moving between cinema and art settings, while resisting stable placement within either. Rather than gathering the films around a shared style, form, or theme, the screening presents different ways artists approach cinema from the context of contemporary art practice, often outside the expectations of narrative closure, standardized duration, and mass distribution.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with New York–based curators and film programmers Sarah Bex Rice (Brooklyn Film Festival), Ariana Kalliga (Amant), Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti (Microscope Gallery), Inney Prakash (Prismatic Ground), and Lukas Brasiskis (e-flux Screening Room). Drawing on their work across different exhibition and screening contexts, they will consider the place artists’ cinema occupies today and how artists’ films meet audiences across theaters, museums, galleries, and film festivals.

This event is co-organized by e-flux Screening Room and the Brooklyn Film Festival. More information about this year’s Brooklyn Film Festival program, which runs May 29 through June 7, can be found here.

Films

Hiwa K, You Won’t Feel a Thing (2025, 22 minutes)
When the artist felt a sharp pain in his lower back, he went to the hospital and was told that he had a kidney stone that only invasive surgery could remove. Hoping to avoid the transactional logic of contemporary medical industries, he visited a local traditional healer. What follows calls into question the marginalization of Indigenous forms of knowledge and healthcare by corporate and Western medical systems.

Basim Magdy, New Acid (2019, 14 minutes)
Shot on Super 16mm and transferred to digital video, New Acid depicts zoo animals in their enclosures exchanging illogical text messages that connect them to the wider world. Through chats between giraffes, ostriches, crocodiles, peacocks, dolphins, and other animals, the film imagines a digital form of communication that is at once absurd, mysterious, and posthuman.

Agnieszka Polska, Perfect Lives (2019, 14 minutes)
In Perfect Lives, Polska reflects on a 1990 control experiment that took place as the Galileo spacecraft passed Earth on its way to Jupiter. Scientists wanted to determine whether data sent from Galileo could confirm the existence of life on Earth. This moment, in which a civilization seeks scientific proof of its own existence, becomes the starting point for a dense, hypnotic essay composed of dynamically edited layers of stock footage.

Maryam Tafakory, Mast-del (2023, 17 minutes)
Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires, both inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Coyolxauhqui (2017, 9 minutes)
The film is a searing evocation of femicide in rural Mexico. It recasts the dismemberment of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the sun god of war and human sacrifice. A visual poem about the cyclical nature of myths, rituals, violence, and death, the film connects current femicides to broader cultural formations.

Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 5 (2005, 6 minutes)
Part of Moulton’s long-running Whispering Pines series, Whispering Pines 5 follows Cynthia, the artist’s alter ego, whose search for purpose and fulfillment unfolds through home decor, self-help paraphernalia, cosmetic rituals, and domestic objects. Moving between the mundane and the mystical, the series explores self-help culture, spiritual longing, and the comic absurdity of personal wellness rituals.

Biographies

Hiwa K was born in Kurdistan-Northern Iraq in 1975. His works escape normative aesthetics but give a possibility of another vibration to vernacular forms, oral histories (Chicago Boys, 2010), modes of encounter (Cooking with Mama, 2006) and political situations (This Lemon Tastes of Apple, 2011). The repository of his references consists of stories told by family members and friends, found situations as well as everyday forms that are the products of pragmatics and necessity. He continuously critiques the art education system and the professionalization of art practice, as well as the myth of the individual artist. Many of his works have a strong collective and participatory dimension, and express the concept of obtaining knowledge from everyday experience rather than doctrine.

Maryam Tafakory, born and raised in Iran, works with film and performance. Solo screenings/exhibitions of her work include MoMA (New York), BOZAR (Brussels), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Academy Museum (Los Angeles), Museum of the Moving Image (New York), and LUX London, among others. Selected group events include Tate Modern (London), Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives (New York). She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival, the Tiger Short Award at the 51st Rotterdam IFF, and the Best Experimental Film Award at the 70th and 71st Melbourne International Film Festival. She was the 2024 winner of the Film London Jarman Award.

Basim Magdy is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice encompasses drawing, sculpture, video, and installation. He works with different media including drawing, painting, animation, installation, sculpture, printed matter, film and sound. He is particularly interested in creating narrative structures that explore the space between reality and fiction and its influence on science, history, global culture and the dissemination of knowledge.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes, and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog mediums, interventions on archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations on documentary and cinematographic devices produce images, both visual and auditory that are political possibilities in their own right.

Ariana Kalliga is a curator based between Athens and New York. Her research focuses on media, the politics of the built environment, and the environmental and political legacies of infrastructures. Ariana has held curatorial positions and fellowships at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, and the Norman Foster Foundation, among other institutions. She is the recipient of a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Curatorial Fellowship by Artworks (2022) and holds a BA in History of Art from the University of Oxford. She is currently pursuing an MA in Curatorial Studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), and curating her thesis exhibition, Mutable Cycles, which turns to recent histories of financial fallout to think through debt, energy, and the right to public goods.

Shana Moulton is a California-born-and-based artist who works in video, performance, and installation. In 2002, Moulton began the video series Whispering Pines, in which she performs as Cynthia, an alter-ego searching for purpose and fulfillment through home decor, self-help paraphernalia, and cosmetic rituals. Moulton has had solo exhibitions at international institutions including Palais De Tokyo in Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work has been featured in Artforum, the New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art, BOMB, and Frieze, among others. Her work has been featured on Art21 and her single-channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.

For more information, contact [email protected].
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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