Driving by the Everson Museum of Art at night, one can catch a glimpse of videos projected onto one of the building’s walls outside. This Thursday, those videos will be shown at a special indoor screening in Watson Theater.

Urban Video Project and Light Work in Watson Theater are partnering to present AKIN: Keren Shavit & Eva Marie Rødbro, for a one-night-only indoor screening and Q&A. The event takes place from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

The exhibit is described in UVP’s press release as delving into the “conventional relationship between documentarian and ‘subject,’ exploring how fraught it can be with conflicting social emotions of recognition, rejection, misunderstanding, and alliance.”
 
Anneka Herre, director of UVP, said the artists aim to make audiences uncomfortable with the intimate details of life that they’re capturing on film.

“The artists work with vulnerable subjects and create images that are beautiful but also sometimes disturbing and often surreal,” she said. “We are led to wonder why they are there and how they gained such intimate access and to question the boundaries between ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ — these questions point to the complex relationships at the heart of all documentary.”

UVP operates in conjunction with the Everson Museum of Art and Onondaga County. The initiative is a part of the SU Coalition of Museum and Art Centers.

Shavit and Rødbro’s full exhibition runs from Feb. 15 to March 31 at the outdoor Everson Museum Plaza on Harrison Street. Three works from that show will be at the Watson Theater event this week — “FIG” by Keren Shavit, and “I Touched Her Legs” and “Tropistic Creatures,” both by Eva Rødbro.

“In the triangle of artist-subject-audience, Rødbro and Shavit don’t give us signposts telling us how to respond to the images they create or where they stand as the documentarians,” Herre said.
 
Shavit and Rødbro are both professional mixed-media artists with international backgrounds. Shavit graduated from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and has screened and published work in Israel, the United States, Poland, Germany, China, Norway and Iceland.

Rødbro attended art academies in Denmark and the Netherlands and has had pieces screened at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam and the 2016 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Herre had followed both artists for a while before “AKIN” but has never worked with them prior to now.

Herre said she hopes the exhibit will make people think, especially because of the deep rifts that seem to be permeating our society.

“We are left to wonder, who do we connect with? Who is our ‘kin’?” she said.

The documentaries and the Q&A component that make up the Light Work event will give viewers access to the practice of these two artists. Herre hopes it will provide viewers with the means to begin to answer those questions.

Published on March 4, 2018 at 10:12 pm

Contact Chloe: cfmathie@syr.edu