e-flux Screening Room, Smack Mellon, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are pleased to co-present a single-channel iteration of A Non-Coincidental Mirror by Carmen Amengual. A conversation with the artist and art historian Soyoung Yoon, Director of Parsons Fine Arts MFA at Parsons School of Design and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, follows the screening. This program is organized in conjunction with Carmen Amengual’s solo exhibition at Smack Mellon Gallery, on view through February 9, 2025.
Carmen Amengual
A Non-Coincidental Mirror, 2024
16mm and digital film, color, sound
TRT 41:41 min.
A Non-Coincidental Mirror is an ongoing project resulting from research that Amengual started in 2022 about a little explored event in the cultural history of Global South solidarities: the First Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers in 1973 and its second iteration in Buenos Aires in 1974. The event served as a hub where self-identified “third-world” filmmakers discussed the role of filmmaking in anti-colonial struggles, made agreements, and strategized about how to produce and distribute films under dire political conditions. The research grew out of an archive Amengual inherited from her mother, who collaborated with the meeting organizers in Algiers. Using architecture as an entry point to the utopian horizons of the past, and to the ruinification of these in the present, the film intertwines an inquiry into political cinema and its methodologies, as they manifested in the Filmmakers’ Meetings with questions about the role of architecture and the decolonial project and the present, as it emerges from the filmic portraits of buildings and urban infrastructure that the artist conducted during her research trips.
Bios:
Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist, independent researcher, and filmmaker from Argentina, now based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the emergence of collective imaginaries, identity formations, and conceptions of time and history that shape political imagination. She has presented her projects in various formats, both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions at Artist Space (New York), Human Resources and 2220 Art & Archives (Los Angeles), Table (Chicago), Biquini Wax EPS (Mexico City), and Museo Centenario (Buenos Aires). Her work has also been featured in conferences such as Film Undone: Elements for a Latent Cinema (Silent Green / Kino Arsenal, Berlin) and Film Act: Third Cinema and Its Legacies (American University in Cairo) and in screenings across the US and abroad.
A Non-Coincidental Mirror is her first solo institutional exhibition in the US. Amengual graduated in Comparative Literature from the University of Buenos Aires and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. She is a 2021–2022 Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Studio Program fellow, a 2022–2024 Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellow, a 2023 and 2024 Graham Foundation grantee, and a 2024 Creative Capital awardee.
Soyoung Yoon is Director of Parsons Fine Arts MFA at Parsons School of Design and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. Yoon received her PhD from Stanford University and holds a BA from Seoul National University; she was also a Faculty at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) till 2023. Yoon’s research offers a sustained inquiry into the politics of mobility and rhetorics of testimony, witnessing, and storytelling in relation to the moving image. Yoon is especially attentive to how art participates in capital’s “expropriation of the senses”: the creation of productive and unproductive bodies, of new capacities and incapacities of perception and experience. Yoon is currently in the process of completing two monographs: Walkie Talkie on the rise of cinéma vérité amid anti-colonial struggles, new techniques of policing, and the new technological capacity for sync sound; and TV Buddhas on theories of suture and narrative, surveillance, and the body politic. A new book on the mattress as an artistic motif, A Mattress is Not a Bed, is in production.
Credits: Carmen Amengual, A Non-Coincidental Mirror, is co-presented by Smack Mellon and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. It is a Vera List Center Fellowship-commissioned project and is supported by research assistance, production grants, and curatorial support by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of its Correction* Focus Theme. Additionally, it is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Creative Capital Foundation, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.