Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
NATHALIE MAGNAN: INTERVENTIONS AND COLLABORATIONS
November 5 – November 6
Nathalie Magnan (1956-2016) was recognized in the English-speaking world and in France as a remarkable media theoretician. Over the course of her career, she edited two anthologies of texts, published numerous articles, and created various websites. As a moving-image artist, she worked as a director for entities across a wide spectrum of the media landscape, making videos for various alternative media collectives as well as the French television giant, Canal +. A pioneer of cyberfeminism, she was one of its most prominent figures, working with Zelig, Faces, and Old Boys Network, and co-moderating the pioneering listserv nettime. Magnan introduced the work of scholar and theorist Donna Haraway to France, translating and publishing “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Spending 12 years in the U.S., where she completed her graduate studies and collaborated with, among others, the media collective Paper Tiger Television, she returned to France in 1990, where she would become a professor at the École Nationale Superieure d’Art in Bourges. A committed, generous, and rebellious teacher, she taught generations of young artists that art could be the practice of freedom. In celebration of her life and career, we host these two programs of her provocative and inspired video work.
Guest-curated by Isabelle Carlier, Catherine Lord, Ernie Larsen, and Reine Prat. Presented with generous support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, as well as from Bandits-Mages and Heure Exquise!; special thanks to Mathieu Fournet, Amélie Garin-Davet, Cathy Nolan, and David Bernagout.
This retrospective is presented alongside our series devoted to radical French video maker Carole Roussopoulos. Both programs have been organized in conjunction with Festival Albertine 2017, an annual series of conversations produced by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Albertine Books that invites French and American authors, artists, scholars, and activists to explore current issues from French and American perspectives. Festival Albertine takes place at Albertine, at 972 Fifth Avenue. For more info, visit: www.albertine.com
From the curators: Nathalie Magnan asked, shortly before her death, that any gifts in her name be made to help the men, women, and children who risk their lives every day trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. We propose that those who wish to contribute make donations to SOS MEDITERRANEE: http://bit.ly/2hpvb9Z
