Touch

Sunday, December 8, 2013, 7:30 pm
UnionDocs

322 Union Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Dirty Looks NYC and UnionDocs present:
TOUCH (New York Premiere)
A new video by Shelly Silver

Program:

Shelly Silver, Touch, HD video, 68 min., 2013

TOUCH is an impressionistic video diary, a 68-minute film narrated by an older gay man who returns to Chinatown to take care of his dying mother. The film is an essay, narrated from one man’s point of view. But it is also fiction, for this man is made up, an amalgam of research, interviews, off-the-record comments, secrets, improbabilities, and free-floating desires. This man, who never tells us his name, returns as both insider and outsider, to a neighborhood from which he, as a teenager, escaped as fast as he could.

Like him, the city has changed and yet the past still haunts his familiar streets.

TOUCH is a poignant and lyrical video diary, a tapestry of vérité camerawork, stolen moments and probing observations, challenging the manner in which we engage with the communities that created us and how we embrace and chronicle images of the everyday.

Shelly Silver is a New York based artist working with the still and moving image. Her work explores contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and--increasingly in recent years--the watcher and the watched.

She has exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum, the London ICA, and the London, the Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin Film Festivals. Silver has received numerous fellowships and grants from organizations such as the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman. Her films have been broadcast by BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte/Germany, France, Planete/Europe, RTE/Ireland, SWR/Germany, and Atenor/Spain, among others, and she has been a fellow at the DAAD Artists Program in Berlin, the Japan/US Artist Program in Tokyo, Cité des Arts in Paris, Yaddo, The Macdowell Colony and at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is Chair of Visual Arts, School of the Arts, Columbia University.

UnionDocs is a Center for Documentary Art that generates and shares big ideas. We bring together a diverse community of experimental media-makers, dedicated journalists, critical thinkers, and local partners on a search for urgent expressions of the human experience, practical perspectives on the world today, and compelling visions for the future.