Screenings and Readings presented by JOAN, Rotations & Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Films by Peter Weiss, Jacqui Duckworth, Julie Dash, Mary Helena Clark, Barbara Hammer, Sarah Ballard, Yelena Gluzman, Onyeka Igwe, Margaret Raspé, and more.

Readings by Danielle Carr, Amelia Bande, and others to be announced.

Curated together by Rotations’ Corina Copp, JOAN’s Suzy Halajian, and artist Alexis Kyle Mitchell, this two-night screening and reading program commemorates the final days of Mitchell’s exhibition The Goal of Our Health, on view at JOAN through January 31. Events for a Moving Body brings together films and readings that think with the body as a site of knowledge, relation, and struggle. Spanning archival and contemporary experimental, ethnographic, and transnational queer, feminist and artist cinema practices, these works reflect on athleticism, performance, hysteria, spirit, and human–animal ecologies; extending Mitchell’s inquiry into how embodied knowledge resists the limits imposed on bodies by medical, economic, social, and ideological structures. 

Mitchell’s JOAN exhibition marks the Los Angeles premiere of her 2024 feature-length film The Treasury of Human Inheritance, which explores the idea of inheritance as a genetic, political, and spiritual set of relations; and includes newly commissioned works that unearth a history and aesthetics of fascist and eugenicist logics and practices. In dialogue, Events for a Moving Body constellates transtemporal moving images that bring into view the body in its sensorial labors—Jacqui Duckworth, Julie Dash, Peter Weiss, Margaret Raspé—with anachronistic works by artists Onyeka Igwe, Yelena Gluzman, Sarah Ballard, and Mary Helena Clark, among others, that immerse us newly. 

How have bodies historically navigated constraint through collectivity, ritual, repetition, and shared forms of attention? Invited poets and scholars Danielle Carr, Amelia Bande, and others will read in and around the film-work, together proposing the body as something not merely acted upon. Instead, histories are embodied, memory flows multidirectionally, and new forms emerge for health, care, and desire outside capitalist and imperialist frameworks.

A Prayer Before Birth confronts debilitating illness with creative vitality, simultaneously desperate and defiant.

In a text responding to the film, Nat Raha writes that in “the space that emerges between fiction, personal experience and surrealism, A Prayer enacts an avant-garde lesbian aesthetic working to come to terms with being in a disabled body, that places the emotional turbulence of this experience front and centre while confronting affects through which ableism coheres."

Study II: Hallucinations is constructed around twelve separate dimensions of time and space in succession. Opposites such as obsession and tiredness, eroticism and aversion call up inner images of human bodies at rest and in motion before the darkness of sleep.

Available Space is a film made for performance on a 360 degree rotary projection table. A woman breaks through confining architectural space, the limited space of a film frame, and the boundaries of a movie screen. Unexpected angles, corners, slants, floor and ceiling are engaged in unexpected play and projection.

In 19th century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.

This footage, shot by author Zora Neale Hurston in the Sea Island community of Beaufort, South Carolina, observes the religious practices of the Gullah people. The footage is accompanied here by field audio recordings by Norman Chalfin, who wrote of the endeavor, "There was no electric power . . . Illumination was from kerosene lamps." Because there was no electricity, they could not effectively synchronize sound and image. In 2006, the footage was selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Please note: we respect and support the national shutdown today. At the same time, we believe being in community remains essential. Now Instant’s program tonight will proceed as planned. All proceeds from this evening will be donated to the Echo Park Vendor Support Fund. Refunds are available for anyone who chooses not to attend. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Guests may add their name to the standby list upon arrival. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released for in-store purchase on a first-come, first-served basis.