Catalogue > At random

Shelly Silver

This Film

Film expérimental | 16mm | noir et blanc | 6:53 | USA, Allemagne | 2018

Filming is alchemy; preserving, seeing, devouring, cutting. Chopping the flow of images with a push of a button. It privileges a solitary unseen protagonist, choosing this over that and then that, it eats anything, not everything. The world hacked into fragments, jumps, frames. Kidnapped buildings gestures people animals happening now, again now, again now. The displacement of what was once to what is now seen carries the odor of end, regardless of the incessant movement of one frame to the next, a machine forcing the celluloid frames forced to run, jump, trip, turning it all into a sad slapstick -- slapstick also embodies heartbreak. A meeting with an old friend, possibly for the last time. [Or] a throwback to a kind of film I never made. But if I did, it would be a noisy film with silence.

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 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, and at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Silver is Associate Professor and Director of Moving Image, Visual Arts Program, School of the Arts, Columbia University.