Screenings and Readings presented by JOAN, Rotations & Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Films by Peter Weiss, Jacqui Duckworth, Julie Dash, Mary Helena Clark, Barbara Hammer, Sarah Ballard, Yelena Gluzman, Onyeka Igwe, Margaret Raspé, and more.

Readings by Danielle Carr, Amelia Bande, and others to be announced.

Curated together by Rotations’ Corina Copp, JOAN’s Suzy Halajian, and artist Alexis Kyle Mitchell, this two-night screening and reading program commemorates the final days of Mitchell’s exhibition The Goal of Our Health, on view at JOAN through January 31. Events for a Moving Body brings together films and readings that think with the body as a site of knowledge, relation, and struggle. Spanning archival and contemporary experimental, ethnographic, and transnational queer, feminist and artist cinema practices, these works reflect on athleticism, performance, hysteria, spirit, and human–animal ecologies; extending Mitchell’s inquiry into how embodied knowledge resists the limits imposed on bodies by medical, economic, social, and ideological structures.

Mitchell’s JOAN exhibition marks the Los Angeles premiere of her 2024 feature-length film The Treasury of Human Inheritance, which explores the idea of inheritance as a genetic, political, and spiritual set of relations; and includes newly commissioned works that unearth a history and aesthetics of fascist and eugenicist logics and practices. In dialogue, Events for a Moving Body constellates transtemporal moving images that bring into view the body in its sensorial labors—Jacqui Duckworth, Julie Dash, Peter Weiss, Margaret Raspé—with anachronistic works by artists Onyeka Igwe, Yelena Gluzman, Sarah Ballard, and Mary Helena Clark, among others, that immerse us newly.

How have bodies historically navigated constraint through collectivity, ritual, repetition, and shared forms of attention? Invited poets and scholars Danielle Carr, Amelia Bande, and others will read in and around the film-work, together proposing the body as something not merely acted upon. Instead, histories are embodied, memory flows multidirectionally, and new forms emerge for health, care, and desire outside capitalist and imperialist frameworks.