Presented in person by members of CAE

In conjunction with the exhibition SEIZED, Hallwalls presents an evening of shorts by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). This program is a look back at the juvenilia of the collective. Rarely do these films see the dark of theater, not just because they were intended to be parts of larger multi-media events, but because they are extremely awkward works. This selection of shorts includes: Shorts; Mirror of Reduction; Baudrillard's Lasso; Godard Revisited; Misappropriation (After Andy Warhol); Indefinite Concrete Material; Speed and Violence; Excremental Culture; Hyperbole and Insubordination; An Immortal's Distractions; Less than Utopia; Crystals and Praxis; Isou's Chisel; Ideological Virus; Sign of Desire; Foucault's Paradox. They are emblematic of the group's eight-year struggle to harmonize the dialogue between theory and practice. Apocalypse and Utopia was the last video that CAE made (although the group has recently been using video once again). When the Web went on-line in that year, CAE abandoned video in favor of graphic user interfaces. Five theorists (Autonomedia Collective, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Greg Ulmer, Tom Kalin, and CAE) attempt to live theoretical interpretations of culture in this "associational documentary." 

riverrun, inc. & UB Humanities Institute presents


Third annual pre-Bloomsday festival of new award-winning independent Irish film Screenings and discussion.
$7 general, $6 Hallwalls members

Friday, June 13
5:30 P.M.: Best of Irish animated & live action short films, 2007—08
From Reel Ireland, a program of the Irish Film Institute.

6:45 P.M.: Small Engine Repair (Niall Heery, 2007, 100 min.). A tale of musical redemption, nominated for 5 Irish Film and Television Awards, including Best Film and Best Film Music. "A great screenplay that refuses cliché or sentimentality...an understated, elegiac, moving film" (BBC Film). With afterwords by Professor Laurence Shine.

9:00 P.M.: The Front Line (David Gleeson, 2007, 95 min.). Four IFTA nominations, including Best Film and Best Director. "A geopolitical crime thriller that carves its own niche" (Sunday Times). With afterwords by Dr. Aimable Twagilimana.

Saturday, June 14
6:45 P.M.: The Front Line
9:00 P.M.: Small Engine Repair

Sunday, June 15
6:45 P.M.: Best of Irish animated & live action short films, 2007—08
8:00 P.M.: Following James Joyce, Dublin to Buffalo
(Patrick Martin & Stacey Herbert, 2004, 60 min.)

Gearing up for Bloomsday, June 16th, this on-location documentary follows James Joyce's life in Dublin, Paris, Trieste, and Zurich, and his manuscripts to the Poetry Collection of UB, right here in Buffalo, NY.

In his multi-media and performance projects, west-coast artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña simultaneously remixes genres and languages, re-imagining border politics. His work blends humor, pop-culture, cyberpunk and activist strategies, and often involves collaborations within communities and across racial, gendered and generational divides. A founding member of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Gómez-Peña continues to work collectively with La Pocha Nostra. In addition to large-scale performances and installations, this ensemble uses workshops as a vehicle for cross-disciplinary cultural production. In his own video works he employs hybrid structures that juxtapose found footage with performance, B-movies with radical manifestos.

In El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD (1995) he performs the role of a pirate veejay who interrupts broadcast television signals from his bunker, offering viewers a radicalized entertainment. In his 2001 mockumentary The Great Mojado Invasion, Part 2 (The Second U.S.- Mexico War), he interrogates Hollywood's colonial gaze within the imagined context of a "New Aztalan Regime." These "Chicano Sci-Fi" videos each use postmodern irony to examine issues of globalization—those occurring on land or manifest in virtual spaces. Thirty years after coming to the United States from Mexico City, Gómez-Peña continues to ask, "What are the new borders that we must cross?"

This screening is in conjunction with /The Imaginary Line/.

/The Imaginary Line/ is a series of exhibitions and screenings which explore the idea of nation-dividing borders to understand the political, cultural, and sociological issues that arise from these boundaries, and also explores borders as intangible, incorporeal delineations that exist within our everyday lives. This summer Hallwalls joins Buffalo Arts Studio and El Museo, to host a series of screenings in conjunction with /The Imaginary Line/ that will include works by Jim Finn, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Ursula Biemann. In August Hallwalls welcomes artist Fereshteh Toosi, who will be in Buffalo/Niagara Falls to create works that commemorate the 30th anniversary of Love Canal, declared a Federal State of Emergency by President Jimmy Carter in August, 1978.

At Hallwalls through August:
7/25/08 at 8 p.m.
Works by Ursula Biemann: Europlex and Performing the Border
8/8/08 at 8 p.m.
Love Canal Memorial screening presented by artist Fereshteh Toosi

At the Buffalo Arts Studio:
On exhibition from May 17—August 9, 2008, works by:
Paula Braswell, Peter Dykhuis, Shelley Niro, and Leandro Soto

At El Museo:
Border Film Project (May 30—July 22, 2008).
Opening Reception June 13, 8—10. On view through July 22, 2008