The Museum of Modern Art and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America have announced a special lecture with Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel to take place on Thursday, May 23 at MoMA’s Education Center in New York City. Untitled To Contest the Deafness of the Gaze, this lecture is the first in a series of conversations with figures key to contemporary cultural production from Latin America.
First with La Ciénaga (2001), and then with The Holy Girl /La niña santa (2004), The Headless Woman /La mujer sin cabeza (2009), and the more recent Zama (2018), Martel has established herself as one of the most distinctively personal contemporary filmmakers. The stories her films tell poignantly address politics, understood as the strife that drives human relationships. With sophistication, they construct universes inhabited by a living multiplicity as sensorial as it is irreducible.
The Argentine filmmaker will discuss her work and the political need to un-learn our relationship to the image and history. “For me,” Martel writes, “it is important to create tools that help us shatter the domestication that has made us stop seeing, stop listening—and become bored with the world. The supremacy of the image is both the distinctive trait of contemporary culture and its Achilles heel.”
Martel will reflect on the relationship between the gaze and the construction of hegemonic identities to propose an alternative, sound-based understanding of time.
Lucrecia Martel has recently shown an interest in languages outside filmmaking. She is the art director of Björk’s Cornucopia. She is currently working on the sound art installation Living Comedor. Her next film, a creative documentary, is titled Chocobar.
The event is free, but RSVP is required. Email cisnerosinstitute_rsvp@moma.org with MARTEL in the subject line to RSVP. For more information visit https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/5566.
