University Calendar

Anuj Vaidya will be present at the screening and will speak about experimental and non-narrative filmmaking, media practices that engage the porous borders of art and film, the possibilities of digital media, and making work under a climate of censorship. He is an artist/filmmaker who lives between the US and India, and who works in the cusp between film and performance. He is also a media curator, one of the co-directors of the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival in San Francisco, and teaches queer studies in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Montclair State University. Apart from co-curating this series, Anuj was also one of the cinematographers on the video Between the Waves which will be screened in this program. 

In a reversal of exhibition practices, this program lines up single channel video art and installations in a repertory film space, and suggests novel ways of considering bodies in movement. These bodies are neither discrete nor constant; they challenge borders and boundaries, and prefer entanglements with other species and other kinds. Varied in their consideration of the digital and in their use of performance practices, the works are primarily by artists living in Mumbai, Goa, and New Delhi.

A woman lies amongst pigeons in a public plaza in Logic of Birds, her body hospitable to their pecking and fluttering; man and bird merge in a play between painting and video in Man with Cockerel; an island sets the stage for bodies becoming other in Fjaka; and melting ice clocks the duration of a row in Iceboat. These performances of time and in space offer new utopias: a universe inhabited by myth and desire is the setting for the queer eco-fable Between the Waves; ancient ruins and spaceships offer a promise of time and space travel in the Forerunner; and a landscape comes to life in the liminal time between digital and analog in Night Noon.

The Film Institute at Montclair State is dedicated to the preservation, growth and experience of the art of film. The Films and Filmmakers series is a weekly program that features filmmakers who come to speak about their work and profession. The series, open to both University students and the general public, welcomes audience questions while being a unique forum to hear inside stories from some of the most innovative filmmakers working in the field today.