The Luminal Theater has our first ever media installation with this exhibition at the Made In NY Media Center by IFP!

RSVP for the November 7th Opening Reception

6pm-8pm

For the second iteration of our How We Move series, subtitled Reverence, Revelation, and Rapture, our senior programmer Jacqui Brown has curated five short films that eloquently capture Black folk navigating liminality.

For this installation, liminality is a place of disorientation and ambiguity, a threshold between the sacred and the secular, in which creativity and heightened existence are incubated.

So often, black movement is conflated with athleticism or rhythm. However, this installation presents the core capability of our movement, which comes from a place charged by terror and glory, rage and respite, legacy and boundless grace. These films reveal, through various experimental techniques, the spaciousness, quiet, rhythm, and colors of our liminal spaces.

Filmmakers Safiyah Chiniere, Ahmad R. Saeed, Russell Hamilton, Gerald Leavell II, and Kyle Pompey suffuse their films and their subjects with both levity and charge, through experimentation and quiet technical skill. Their films share an activation by our peers, a reverence for our elders, and the interconnected melodies of our words. Microfilms THE WOODS (2019) by Safiyah Chiniere, and Kingdom Day (2019) and Sunday El Co (2019) by Russell Hamilton, are curated as refrains. These films serve as groundations by two Jamaican-American filmmakers, helping to unearth and distill cinematic revelations within the longer films, How Did You Feel After Receiving Notice of Your Extermination? (2017) by Ahmad Saeed and Call it Krushed (2018) by Gerald Leavell II and Kyle Pompey.

We are suspended, and because of this, so close to our magic. You can't replicate it, these extrasensory haloes of experience; this is what you can't appropriate.

Our exhibit will be up in the Gallery of the Made In NY Media Center from November 7th to December 2nd, and the gallery is open Monday through Friday to the public from 12pm-9pm.

Featured Works:

THE WOODS (2019) by Safiyah Chiniere – In her microfilm, THE WOODS, filmmaker Safiyah Chiniere envelops her subjects and audiences in the healing power of greenery and the suspension of natural experiences. Powered by the words of the healer Dr. Sebi, Chiniere supplies a film with the potential of a meditative healing, recalling the deep legacy of black herbalism, and demonstrating through the reverence of her subjects, the deep impact Black folk have had on American ecology. 

How Did You Feel After Receiving Notice of Your Extermination? (2017) by Ahmad Saeed – How Did You Feel After Receiving Notice of Your Extermination? is a creatively unflinching description of the existential impact of Blackness in America. Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based Filmmaker, Designer, and Artist Ahmad R. Saeed culls the rage of their peers and leaves the disoriented weight at your front door. But rage is so much more than it's weight, and Saeed shapes the boundless energy and charged glory which remain as an offering to Black folk, illuminating a path forward which only we are perceptive to. 

Kingdom Day (2019) by Russell Hamilton – Atlanta-born, LA-based filmmaker Russell Hamilton deftly captures the abundant, and nostalgically reverent worlds created by diverse communities of Black Angelenos celebrating an annual Black American ritual – the Martin Luther King Day parade. Kingdom Day is narrated in a musical exchange between Dr. King's "How Long? Not Long!" speech (Birmingham, AL, 1965) and the instrumental of Erykah Badu's "My People", transmitting the promise of victory amidst collective struggle, as illustrated by the economic transformation of Los Angeles' Crenshaw District.

Sunday El Co (2019) by Russell Hamilton – Sunday El Co distills crew life in a lifestyle editorial of a young black man & his crew on a California Sunday.

Call it Krushed (2018) by Gerald Leavell II & Kyle Pompey – In Call it Krushed, Dallas-based Artist and Educator Gerald Leavell II collaborates with Baltimore-based “organic photojournalist”, Kyle Pompey, in presenting a stylized depiction of “what is seen” and “what is felt” in relation to our environment(s) and social concerns. Pompey documents as Leavell observes an enormous quasi-structure and traverses the ruins of a dystopian East Baltimore, alluding to our worst fears for our collective futures. Call it Krushed prompts critical questions – and projects a cinematic vision – of what it is to be “Krushed”.