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matters of duration Kemi Craig

Fri. October 13th 2017 - Sun. November 5th 2017
the fifty fifty arts collective By Donation (All Ages)
At times gallery hours fluctuate unexpectedly based on volunteer availability. Please contact the 50/50 if you would like to confirm visiting times or to book a viewing.
matters of duration is a video installation exploring the materiality of trauma and the simultaneity of joy expressed through images of everyday life. Gathered from analogue film and mobile devices, the images are projected onto storefront windows. One window features a Super 8 film of a dancer; the film is repeatedly run through a projector, begging the question: how long can the material body survive the markings, scratches, and cuts wrought by the machine before breaking? In the second window a loop of digital images is superimposed by a soundscape featuring interviews navigating ways of looking and seeing that call upon themes of afrofuturism and hauntology. Together these works elicit a figuration for raced and gendered experiences through analogue and digital technologies.

A crucial element of matters of duration is an exercise in collaborative destabilization and restructuring of images and narratives that populate dominate culture. As a part of this work, Craig will host a DIYmini-projector workshop culminating in a participatory screening of video image collages created by attendants. Details to come.

Kemi Craig is a contemporary analogue artist living and working in the traditional territories of the
Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. A sixth-generation American of African ancestry raised in the
Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, her work explores the contingencies of identity through
raced and gendered bodies. Working through projections of Super 8 film, 16mm handmade animation and cellphone video, she interrogates agency from the positionality of looking as well as being looked at.