The Speculative Archive: Ja'Tovia Gary and Cauleen Smith

Presented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Cauleen Smith and Ja’Tovia Gary in person, in conversation with Christopher Harris and Allyson Nadia Field. 

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (Cauleen Smith, 1992, 7’, 16mm) 

In this short, shot on 16 mm film in 1992, Cauleen Smith employs her alter ego Kelly Gabron and a collage of images, text, and voices in order to fabricate a history in which the presence of Black women is reinserted into histories that often render them invisible.

Sine at the Canyon & Sine at the Sea (Cauleen Smith, 2016, 8’, digital) 

Sine at the Canyon & Sine at the Sea began as a video designed to be background eye-candy at an outdoor performance event and evolved, at the invitation of Chris Stults and Genevieve Yue, into a protest against the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense percolating in American culture.

Three Songs About Liberation (Cauleen Smith, 2017, 10’, digital) 

Filmed in Chicago, Three Songs features three Black women performing historical monologues drawn from the 1973 book “Black Women in White America: A Documentary History,” edited by Gerda Lerner.

The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2019, 42’, digital) 

Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.

Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary is deeply concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her work. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. This program features the full version of The Giverny Document (2019), filmed on location in Harlem and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production. 

Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist who roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, Smith constructs immersive installations, moving-image works, sculpted objects, and textiles engaging with non-Western cosmologies, Afro-diasporic histories, Black cultural icons, and real and speculative utopias. This program includes three short films by Smith that span her practice: Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992), a densely layered collage of images, texts, and competing voices that combine to offer a meditation on mediation, identity, and self-representation. Sine at the Canyon & Sine at the Sea (2016), a protest against what she calls “the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense” currently percolating in American culture. And Three Songs About Liberation (2017), filmed in Chicago as part of the exhibition “Revolution Every Day” (Smart Museum of Art, 2017-18). 

Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.