Exhalations:
Films by Kalpana Subramanian
March 24, 2023 at 8pm
Join us on Friday March 24 for a rare Los Angeles screening and conversation with celebrated film and media artist Kalpana Subramanian.
For over 20 years, Kalpana Subramanian has created a remarkable body of work spanning films, media art, children’s books, scholarship, and curatorial work. Her recent work is invested in a cinema of breath: a framework for radical cinema grounded in intersectional-feminist and decolonial thought, alternative approaches to embodiment, and what Achille Mbembe calls “the universal right to breathe.” This solo screening brings together recent and older short films from 2002 to the present day, including the entirety of her Light Mediated series.
The filmmaker will be present for a Q&A following the screening.
Tickets:
Friday, March 24, 2023 at 8pm
$10 Students, Members, Seniors, Underemployed
$12 General Admission
$5 CalArts Students With ID
Seating is extremely limited, advance reservations strongly encouraged
Note: Masks are required for all events at Automata.
About the artist:
KALPANA SUBRAMANIAN is an artist-filmmaker and scholar of experimental film and media. Her current research investigates the poetics of breath in experimental film using a transcultural and interdisciplinary approach. Her work has been supported by grants including a Humanities Institute Advanced PhD Fellowship (University at Buffalo, 2022-23), the UK Environmental Film Fellowship (2006) and the Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship (University of Colorado Boulder, 2015-16). Her films have been presented at venues including the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Interfilm Berlin, National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai, India), UNESCO (France), Antimatter Media Arts (Canada), Asia Society, Union Docs and Flaherty NYC Seminar (USA) among others. She has received awards for her films at the Documentary Festival of History and Archeology (Perugia, Italy, 2015), Montana CINE International Film Festival (2003, 2005) and CMS Vatavaran (2008). Her curated film programs have been screened at the Alternative cinema series (Colgate University, USA), Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (UK) and Simon Fraser University (Canada) among others. She is presently a doctoral candidate and an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo.
This program was originally presented by Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY), curated by Ekrem Serdar.
Special thanks to Journey’s End Refugee Services.
This program is supported, in part, through a Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation IDEA Visiting Artist Award, and is part of Kalpana Subranamian’s Residency at the CalArts, in collaboration with the CalArts School of Theater and CalArts School of Film/Video, with additional support from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.