Blockbusters:Screening and Artist Talk
Saturday, Sep 20, 2025 at 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Location: Museum of Moving Image - William Fox Amphitheater
Part of Open Worlds 2025
The screening will be followed by a talk with Blockbusters moderated by Rebecca Cleman, Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). The video program will also screen at 4:00 and 5:00 p.m.
This free screening and artist talk is presented by New York–based video and new media art collective Blockbusters, formed in 2021 to connect the work of members with cultural roots in several countries including Australia, Chile, Iran, Ireland, India, Israel, Pakistan, and the United States. Blockbusters’ artists, including Camila Galaz, Dakota Gearheart, Jonah King, Bahareh Khoshooee, Umber Majeed, Gal Nissim, Surabhi Saraf, and Ryan Woodring, use the video medium to uncover patterns and remnants of histories yet to be told. The works in this program critically examine aesthetic and sociopolitical implications of time-based language and the digital interfaces that mediate and shape experience and identity.
Screenings include:
You Transform Everything into a BoatCamila Galaz, 2017, 4 mins.
You Transform Everything into a Boat uses gesture and storytelling to explore the idea of post-memory within diasporic communities. Drawing on Galaz’s Chilean heritage, the piece connects two pivotal moments from her father’s life: his conscription into the Navy and his later involvement in a leftist guerrilla group resisting the Pinochet regime. The text subtitles are a separate narrative to the spoken audio, and were constructed from interviews between Galaz and her father.
Life Touching LifeDakota Gearhart, 2023, 9 mins.
In this second episode of an animated series, we meet a meditating AI algorithm and watch electricity become sentient. Collaborators include software engineer Anisha Uppugondrui and electronic composer Silvia Kastel.
Thoughts and Prayer from the Glowing RectangleBahareh Khoshooee, 2023, 9 mins.
Composed of four chapters, this autobiographical work recounts a variety of interconnected narratives that, through the lens of technology and diaspora, explore the personal and collective experiences of loss, grief, and the impact of witnessing death and violence remotely on the internet.
All My Friends Are in the CloudJonah King, 2017, 4 mins.
Exploring intimacy and ephemerality in digital ecosystems, this project is, at its heart, a continuously growing digital archive displayed on a column of video monitors. As these images rise, they dissolve into a swirl of digital fragments, disintegrating entirely by the time they reach the top of the screen. In collaboration with Arto Lindsay, Jonah King directed the music video for “Uncrossed” from Lindsay’s album Cuidado Madame. This video extends the project’s themes, depicting Arto Lindsay and his son, Noah, in an embrace that gradually disintegrates into the digital cloud.
In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present Umber Majeed, 2019, 10 mins.
Through state and family archives, Majeed speculates on a feminist re-historicization of Pakistan as the first “Muslim nuclear state.” The video outlines the artist’s inquiry into nuclear nationalism and its implications on the citizen-body. Through a multitude of sources ranging from familial archival material and South Asian digital kitsch, Majeed unpacks a dispersed, porous homeland. Remnants of the female body and flora outline women as the vessels used to perpetuate state ideological notions of love, science, and nature. The intention is to make the subjectivities visible outside of the patriarchal imaginary of the Islamic Republic.
For the Birds
Gal Nissim, 2022-2023, 6 mins.
This video was co-created with wild birds in upstate New York and documents the birds as they eat, transforming the sculpture to reveal a secondary form hidden underneath the seeds. The sculpture appears as a hybrid bird-human, hinting at ancient legends while also representing future possibilities where humanity shifts into a role of attending to nature. Made in collaboration with Leslie Ruckman and Black-capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmouses, House Finch, White-breasted Nuthatch, Dark Eyed Junco.
Apni’s Alaap
Surabhi Saraf, 2024, 6 mins.
Apni’s Alaap invites viewers into the world of Apni—a “kinmaker” and quantum listener whose name reflects her kaleidoscopic and porous identity. The work features Apni as she moves slowly, listening through time, matter, and spirit. Apni can mean yours, mine, my, hers, ours, theirs, self, or own. To call someone “apni” is to say she is one of us, or she is her own. This duality embodies the essence of belonging, blurring the boundaries between self and other, an exploration core to the practice of “kinmaking.” It is believed that the first kin must always be made with oneself. Through quantum listening, Apni embodies her name, weaving these complex layers of identity and connection into portals for healing wounds that traverse time.
spot healing
Ryan Woodring, 2024, 9 mins.
This short film poses as a software tutorial from the “Image E.R.” YouTube channel. The host undergoes a series of intense physical and emotional transformations while demonstrating how to “heal” sick images using increasingly experimental methods ranging from miming to machine learning. This metadrama plays with the intricacies of illness, diagnosis, and labor in post-AI visual
culture.