Six poetry films, with image and music by Lior Shamriz, made for poem readings by the Griffin Poetry Prize nominees, Ocean Vuong, Iman Mersel, Robyn Creswell, Roger Reeves, Susan Musgrave, Ada Límon, and the Canada First Book Prize winner Emily Robbles.
A new video work by Lior Shamriz is to be presented at Institute for Arts and Science in Santa Cruz, as part of the Coha-Gunderson Prize exhibition. Taking place June 2-3, 2023.
Two films by Lior Shamriz – “Port Saïd, Santa Cruz, Sarmad Kashani” & “Fetish Puppies Break Free!” will screen at “Watch and Chill 3.0”. The exhibition is an initiative of South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), in collaboration with the National Gallery Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, the Tono Festival in Mexico City, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.
The films will also be available globally through the event’s online platform, beginning April 7, 2023 (which coincides with the opening of the Gwangju Biennial) through April 7, 2024. The exhibition presentation in Seoul will take place from April 12 – July 23, 2023. The Tono Festival runs in Mexico City from April 18 – 30, 2023 in Mexico, and the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition runs in Melbourne from January 5 – April 7, 2024. Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, will screen the films in November 2023.
Mimesis – Film as Performance magazine. In January 2023, #1 issue – “The Fringes of Resistance” was launched, with contributions by Noor Abed, Bojana Cvejić, Mariah Garnett, Matt Polzin, Lior Shamriz, and Elbe Trakal. To celebrate the launch, Mimesis will hold two evenings with short films and a table reading at:
As part of the Toronto Queer Film Festival Queer Wonderlands symposium, Lior Shamriz will take part in the keynote presentation on April 23, 2023.
With witty irony and superfluous melodrama, Lior Shamriz treats cinema not merely as the documentation of a dramatic performance but as a trace of the interaction between actors, crew, memory, and place, using the screen to project and examine topics like immigration, post-colonialism and orientalism, othering and belonging. “A separation of reality from mimesis is a dualist illusion,” Shamriz says. “A film is often not a record of an interaction, but rather, it is the interaction with the spaces we visit and the people we encounter”. For their keynote talk, Shamriz will discuss their work in research-based essay videos, poetry videos, performance, and independent cinema, and will turn to Keguro Macharia’s concept of Frottage to consider cinema as a medium of gathering traces of interactions that activate our engagement with the world.
ESTUARIES will screen at the Toronto Queer Film Festival in late March 2023.
More information on their website:
On February 15, Lior Shamriz visits Lydia Hicks’s Directing class at University of North Carolina School of the Arts for a workshop.
Mimesis Magazine – Film as Performance – Issue #1 – Winter 2023
Interested in the politics of resistance as well as in forces of resistance within the unconscious, we take a close look at the margins of the personal and the political in film practices. The mimesis of the media environment that encompasses us is crucial as much as it is endemic. Considering our social encounters as remakes of visual and time-based culture, we feel the need to unravel the cinematically entangled body and its colonial, authoritarian, patriarchal, and capitalist histories. Be it in public dance choreographies, the intimate practice of reading, ancient mesopotamian storytelling, agitprop theater or neorealist cinema – in “The Fringes of Resistance” we try to carve out the mutable contours of territories of power and make them visible to us. In our first issue we sift for threads to pick up from the myths of authenticity, identification and ideology that are engraved in the images that surround us. Through essays, fiction and conversations we explore contradictions in our practices, theorize them and (try to) make them work for us and for others.
With contributions by Noor Abed, Bojana Cvejić, Mariah Garnett, Matt Polzin, Lior Shamriz and Elbe Trakal.
Lior Shamriz’s Bird Divination in Mesopotamia Today receives the Coha Gunderson Prize from UCSC, where Shamriz is now pursuing a Ph.D.
Review by Lior Shamriz about Jamie Berry’s Whakapapa/Algorithms, published by Pacific Arts journal. The article is accessible here:
Read Lior Shamriz’s 2022 top tens on Desistfilm:
This Q&A video was recorded for the Steak Cinema / AjoByAjo screening in Seoul in summer 2021. The questions were sent by Jongwook Choi and Nilesh Kumar from Steak Cinema.
THE NIGHT & BEYOND LOVE AND COMPANIONSHIP are now available on Here.TV, accessible also through Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire.
“SATURN RETURNS Returns With RETURN RETURN” – at Steak Cinema 311. August 5 from 7pm, with director in-person Q&A
Screening Sunday, July 17 at the Redcat in DTLA
Watch the Griffin Poetry Prize Winner Announcement Film – with 7 poetry videos by Lior Shamriz, for readings by Ed Roberson, Douglas Kearney, Liz Howard, Gemma Gorga, Tolu Oloruntoba, David Bradford and Natalka Bilotserkivets:
ESTUARIES will premiere at FRAMELINE 46 on Saturday evening, June 25 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.
A native of New Orleans, Barbara McCullough has spent most of her life in southern California. Her initial interest was in photography but the moving image, immediacy, and possible forum for ideas set her on a path of exploration. McCullough’s work progressed to examining the creative process of artists but always maintaining a fascination with experimental film and video. McCullough sees herself as part of the continuum of African American storytellers whose aim is to preserve knowledge by capturing the essence of her culture — its life, spirit, and magic. She states, “I am dedicated to the preservation of the heritage of the African American artist/cultural worker by documenting her/his achievements for future generations to keep the music and visual poetry alive.” Her work has been shown in galleries, museums, and film festivals nationally and internationally and she is associated with UCLA filmmakers known as the LA Rebellion.
https://arts.ucsc.edu/news_events/conversation-filmmaker-barbara-mccullough
The Cage (2017) is now available via GagaOOLala, a Taiwan-based distribution company with one of the world’s largest LGBTQ+ streaming libraries.
“Port Saïd, Santa Cruz, Sarmad Kashani”, a new short film by Lior Shamriz, will premiere in May 2022 in situ at the Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage in Germany.
The film is 14 minutes long. “A triptych about projections on bodies, made by projecting on my body.”
