Join author Claudia Rankine and filmmaker John Lucas for a screening of and Q&A about the latest in their Situations series.
Situations, in Rankine's words, "is a multi-genre response to contemporary life in the twenty-first century. Each video is in dialogue with a natural disaster or a national or international event or policy. Our intent was to interrogate the political and cultural impact of catastrophic events on individual lives through layered responses to moments such as the attack on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina or “stop and frisk” laws. At times, these events were set in motion by a single encounter, as in the World Cup headbutt where Zinedine Zidane felt the assault that language can yield and responded to it. At other times, social media supplied us with the videos of shootings of unarmed people of color that were collaged in order to recreate the effect of an accumulated affront on a life, on lives. As artists and citizens, we were especially interested in how the media informs our understanding through specific racialized framing of these public events. Our national discourse reinforces or interrupts ideas informing the racial imaginary and since many, if not all, of these events engage the language of race and racism, this age-old tension was crucial as we set out to marry language to image. The documentary impulse behind Situations can be seen not only in the appropriated images but also in the appropriated language. Our titles attempt to locate the events in real time and in some works, like Hurricane Katrina, the text, for the most part, is taken from actual statements made in response to the displacement and abandonment of American Citizens. It is our feeling that both devastating images and racist statements need management. In other videos a frame was built for the images through appropriated texts from literary and philosophical sources which exist alongside the poetic lines. This ongoing series was conceived in part as a civic response to an archive of images of contemporary life that carries with them the legacy of the “afterlife of slavery.”
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in California and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
John Lucas has worked as a documentary photographer for more than 25 years and has directed and produced several cutting-edge multimedia projects. In 2014, Lucas completed his first feature-length documentary film “The Cooler Bandits,” which was awarded best documentary at the 2014 Harlem International Film Festival. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally including the Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Redcat, OK Harris Works of Art, La Panaderia, Aeroplastics Contemporary and Fieldgate Gallery.