Benjamin Tiven

In a series of short films and video clips, this program draws an intertwined history of spectrality, animality, and cinema. Set within theaters, archives, or open landscapes, the films stage the interfaces between human bodies and various types of cinematographic machines, often told in self-reflexive narratives or via moments of bleak humor. Each type of mechanism is differently inhabited by its own ancestralities, or somehow predicts its descendants; each has its own idiom of haunting.

Film program

The Otolith Group, Sovereign Sisters, 2015, 5 min
Benjamin Tiven, Chess Story, 2010, 11 min
Benjamin Tiven, A Third Version of the Imaginary, 2012, 12 min
Matthew Buckingham, False Future, 2007, 11 min
Donkey explosion at IDF checkpoint, 2001, 30 s
Thom Andersen, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, 1975, 59 min
American Drone Bird Crashes in Waziristan, Geo-TV (Karachi), 2011, 1 min
Benjamin Tiven, Two Devices, 2014, 10 min

Introduction by Viktoria Metschl, screening followed by a conversation between Benjamin Tiven and Noit Banai

Benjamin Tiven is an American filmmaker and writer. Recent exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Delfina Foundation, London; Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck; 1/9unosunove gallery, Rome; Fotografisk Centre, Copenhagen; and Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster. Films screened at the Viennale, FIDMarseille, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Courtisane, the Museum of the Moving Image, and Arsenal, Berlin. Tiven has contributed to journals including Triple Canopy, Bidoun, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Bulletins of the Serving Library. He completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012, and was recently a visiting faculty member at Temple University and the School of Visual Arts. In 2015, he co-convened and co-edited the book Scrim Sinews (Cura Books, Rome).

Noit Banai is Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna; her book on Yves Klein was published in the Critical Lives series by Reaktion Books in London in 2014 and she is currently at work on a book project titled Imagining Europe between Nation State and Border State: Public Disorder and the Search for a Universal Subject, 1938–1973, which examines the aesthetic mediation of Europe in the postwar years. She is a frequent contributor to magazines including Artforum International or Texte zur Kunst, and has contributed catalogue essays for many international exhibitions, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Barbican Art Gallery, Americas Society, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Schirn Kunsthalle, and Documenta.

Viktoria Metschl a member of staff in the research project Delocalisation, Figuration, Archive at the University of Vienna, where she works on the Algerian history of decolonization and cinema. She lives and works in Vienna.