An Evening with Shelly Silver

Electronic Arts Intermix is pleased to host artist and filmmaker Shelly Silver in conversation about her feature-film-in-progress, Projection of an Odd Rectangle. Silver will screen excerpts from previous works followed by a dialogue with Susan Bernofsky, a writer, translator of German-language literature, and Professor of Writing at Columbia University. Silver and Bernofsky will pose questions to the audience addressing the themes of memory, place, and their relationship to institutionalized history and national identity.

Set in four locations in and around Potsdam, Germany—Frederick the Great’s summer palace, Sanssouci; Babelsburg Film Studio; House of the Wannsee Conference, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research—Projection of an Odd Rectangle explores the tangled lines of power, history, violence and fantasy that can be drawn between them. Shifting focus from the position of victim to perpetrator, and supporter to bystander, Projection of an Odd Rectangle raises questions of identification: With whom do we outwardly and secretly identify, and why?

Silver's work explores contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and increasingly, in recent years, the watcher and the watched. Frequently responding to specific locations—from her neighborhood in Chinatown, to the Marais in Paris, to the East and West sides of the former Berlin Wall—Silver focuses on the shifting definitions of the words used to describe political and economic systems, and individual and national identities. Spoken and written texts, collaged narratives, and the time and space in which Silver's videos are set all become tools to address the shifting dynamics of power, identity and desire at play within everyday life.

Please note that Thursday, May 22nd is the new date for this event, changed from May 13.

Shelly Silver is an artist and filmmaker working with the still and moving image. Her work has shown extensively at venues worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum of Art. Her films have been broadcast by BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte/Germany, France, Planete/Europe, RTE/Ireland, SWR/Germany, and Atenor/Spain. Silver has held fellowships at the DAAD Artists Program in Berlin, the Japan/US Artist Program, Cité des Arts in Paris, and LMCC/NY, TOKAS/Tokyo, Macdowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco and Montalvo Residencies. She is Professor and Director of Moving Image at the School of the Arts, Columbia University.

Susan Bernofsky has translated more than twenty books including three novels and four collections of short prose by Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. She was a 2020 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, 2019 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and past Guggenheim fellow. Most recently, she is the author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton. Bernofsky is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of the Arts, and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia in the School of the Arts Writing Program.

Projection of an Odd Rectangle is supported in part by a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.

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