Adam Pendleton’s work is a reflection of how we increasingly move through and experience the world on a sensorial level. It investigates Blackness as a color, an identity, a method, and a political subject—in short, as a multitude. Since 2008 he has articulated much of his work through the frame of Black Dada, an evolving inquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Working in modes or registers, rather than mediums, his practice has over the past ten years also resulted in poignant film portraits. In this film night, we bring together two of these portraits: that of Yvonne Rainer - godmother of American contemporary dance, and queer theorist Jack Halberstam.

Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer
2016–17 Video (black and white, sound) 13 min, 51 sec

Four decades after she changed the course of modern dance, Yvonne Rainer reached an even wider audience with her 2006 memoir Feelings Are Facts. Excerpts from the book figure prominently in this video portrait, as do an essay by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), a speech by Malcolm X, and a poem by Ron Silliman. Rainer reads these textual excerpts aloud at a Chelsea diner, where she sits down with Adam Pendleton to discuss events both recent and long past. The conversation, which pauses for a standing movement exercise, is also intercut with clips from Rainer’s 1978 performance of her iconic dance Trio A.

So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam
2021, Video (black and white, sound), 30 min, 59 sec

Jack Halberstam is a writer, a professor of gender studies, and an authority on the transcendental ambiguity of the self. This video portrait presents him in almost constant motion: walking through a park, cycling on city streets, swimming laps at a public pool. Its title comes from a poem by T. S. Eliot, one of several texts that punctuate Halberstam’s reflections on thinking and being. “I was given a platform in which to be a complex self,” he says about the process of making the portrait, “not just being rooted in a set of opinions, but being defined by the way that you move through the world.”