INAATE / SE / [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./]
Monday April 9, 2018 7 PM Communications 150 (Studio C)
with filmmaker Adam Khalil
History is written by the victors, but this film reminds us that the history of the oppressed can still be saved from being extinguished. Native American video artists Adam and Zack Khalil here reclaim the narrative of the Ojibway of Sault Ste. Marie, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, from the archives and museums that would confine it to the past. Using personal interviews, animated drawings, performance, and provocative intercutting, the Khalil brothers’ feature debut makes a bold case for the Ojibway people to be their own storytellers—while seeking a cure for the damage inflicted by colonization—in a spiritual reconnection with tradition.
ANTI-ETHNOGRAPHY
Tuesday April 10, 2018 7:10 PM Oakes Academic Building 105
Curated by Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil
with filmmaker Adam Khalil
Anti-Ethnography is a selection of video works which examines the violence inherent in the ethnographic impulse, and unveils the absurd fetishism underpinning the discipline. For indigenous peoples the camera is a dangerous weapon, one that has been wielded against us since the device’s inception. Anthropology’s obsession with preserving images of our “vanishing” cultures, through ethnographic films or archives filled with boxes of our ancestors’ remains, has long been a tool used to colonize and oppress indigenous peoples. By relegating our identities to the past, and forcing us to authenticate ourselves through this past, our existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonized land is denied. It is in this sense that ethnography confines indigenous agency. The anthropologist’s encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that for indigenous communities tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever-evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation, only elaborated through struggle, and finally achieved under conditions of genuine self-determination.
Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil (Ojibway) are filmmakers and artists from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Their films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, Walker Arts Center, e-flux, Microscope Gallery (New York), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), and Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay). Both graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College, are UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows, Gates Millennium Scholars, 2017 Sundance Indigenous Opportunity Fellows and 2018 Sundance Art of Non Fiction grant recipients .