Joanna Raczynska: Playing Un-Documented Utopias

Wednesday, November 6^th, 2013 at 4 pm

Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

The inaugural program of the six-part lecture series Jump Over Time: Uses of Documentation Video features the project’s curator, Joanna Raczynska, who will present an overview of the project with excerpts of video work by Martha Rosler, Karen Finley, and Zoe Beloff.

Included in the lecture will be the presentation of two recent works: People to be Resembling (Otolith Group, UK/India, 2012, 22 minutes), “a five sided portrait of the methodologies of the post-free jazz, pre-world music trio Codona. People to be Resembling returns to 1978 in order to re-dream the recording process at Tonstudio Bauer as a meditation upon the relations between visual anthropology, anti-colonial choreography, nuclear annihilation and Weltmusik;” and Walk Through (Redmond Entwistle, USA/UK, 2013, 17 minutes), “an exploration of the site, design and philosophy of the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, as a starting point for posing wider questions about contemporary pedagogical models and their relationship to new forms of social, political and economic exchange that have emerged since the 1970s.”

Jump Over Time: Uses of Documentation Video
Jump Over Time looks at some creative uses of video documentation as an idiom and form used by media artists. When does the video documentation of an event shift from witness to evidence? If a performance is designed for the camera is the urgency, the live-ness, of the performance obliterated?  When the video maker’s intent is to re-present a specific historic period, action, or happening, can reenactments be considered documentation? Selected works as well as visiting artists and archivists will speak to the many ways archives—brimming with mediated experiences—are critical to cultural determination, memory, and practice.

Joanna Raczynska is the Assistant Head of Film Programs in the Department of Film Programs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She earned her master’s degree in documentary by practice from Royal Holloway College, University of London in 2001. She first started making non-fiction films ands videos in 1996, while a student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her works have screened internationally and across the United States, most recently at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has previously worked for a variety of non-profit organizations including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY (where she served as Media Arts Director from 2002 – 2006), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Baltimore Museum of Art.