POLYPHONIC PORTRAITS OF A NEW AMERICA

POLYPHONIC PORTRAITS OF A NEW AMERICA is comprised of Natalie Bookchin‘s award-winning film Long Story Short, and her new film, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.  Followed by live video chat with Natalie Bookchin.

Artist Natalie Bookchin’s sensitive, bracing work examines the ways self-expression is broadcast in a sharing economy. Her installations and films have shown at museums including MoMA, LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA Los Angeles, Creative Time, the Whitney Museum and the Tate Museum. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant and a MacArthur Foundation Film Grant.

Now he’s out in public and everyone can see (2017, 24 minutes) presents a fractured narrative about an unnamed man whose racial identity is continually redrawn and contested by clusters of impassioned narrators. This intricately edited film uses found video footage to explore questions of racism and racial identity in the post-Obama world.

Long Story Short (2016, 45 minutes), winner of the Grand Prize at the 2016 Cinema du Réel Film Festival in Paris, France, addresses people’s experiences of poverty: why they are poor, how it feels, and what they think should be done about American poverty and homelessness today. Filmed in homeless shelters, food banks, adult literacy programs and job training centers, Bookchin layers and synchronizes dozens of interviews with an intricate and original multi-image editing technique.

Together, Polyphonic Portraits of a New America by Natalie Bookchin is a major work by a deft and innovative artist attuned to the rhythms and tropes of a deeply divided contemporary America.