AMBER BEMAK & ANGELO MADSEN MINAX

GIMME YR BLOOD

Friday, October 1, 2021 (7:30pm)

$10 / Free for Aurora Members

NOTE: Due to rain, this screening will take place inside, with limited capacity and masks required.

Angelo Madsen Minax in attendance

Aurora presents a special screening of short films by Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax featuring the Texas premiere of their collaborative video Two Sons and a River of Blood as well as a selection of their recent, individual shorts. Collectively, these personal, experimental works of autoethnography incorporate elements of documentary, performance, fantasy, and myth-building to examine Queer embodiment and love. Alternately messy and succinct, Minax and Bemak's projects both create emotional resonance and challenge the politics of desire.

NOTE: Mature content. Adults only.

Angelo Madsen Minax

Angelo Madsen Minax works in film and video, sound and music, text, installation, and sometimes other media too. His projects explore queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological kinships, cosmic, natural, and technological phenomena, and often draw on autoethnography. Madsen's works have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Tom of Finland Institute, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, KurzFilm Hamburg, Berlinale, Tribeca Film Festival, the European Media Art Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Berwick Media Arts Festival, Alchemy Festival of Moving Image, and dozens of LGBT film festivals around the world. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. Madsen has received numerous fellowships including at the Sundance Film Institute (2019); the Tribeca Film Institute (2019); LEF Moving Image Foundation (2019); and BAVC (2020). His newest feature film North By Current premiered at Berlinale: Berlin International Film Festival, premiered in the US at the Tribeca Film Festival, and was acquired by POV and broadcast on PBS nationally. Madsen also is also an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, and co-curates Anthology Film Archives' "Cinema of Gender Transgression" quarterly film series.

Amber Bemak

Amber Bemak is a filmmaker, artist, and educator currently living in Dallas. Her work is based in experimental and documentary filmmaking, and as well as performance art and curatorial practice. For the past two decades, she has been engaged in a multi-layered exploration of performance and film which uses the body as a sight for socio-political inquiry, engages with text, language, and translation to open up discourse around deeply embedded colonization narratives, and commits to linking the intimate and personal with larger institutional structures. Her work draws from cinematic practice, pedagogy around ethics of representation, queer theory and lived experience, a deep commitment to a global perspective, and Buddhist philosophical frameworks and cultures. Bemak is currently working on a hybrid performance documentary film about the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra. Amber’s work has been seen at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, the Schwules Museum, and the Tamayo Museum. Festivals include Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, DocLisboa, Morelia, and the European Media Art Festival. She has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico and the United States.

All Aurora Picture Show staff members, visiting artists, volunteers, and representatives have been fully vaccinated. Although it cannot be required, Aurora prefers that all audience members be fully vaccinated. Masking is required inside our venue, but is optional while in our spacious, outdoor courtyard.

In the case of inclement weather, outdoor programs that were planned for Aurora’s outside space will be relocated to our inside space (for the same date and time), which will have a reduced capacity and require masking by all. These decisions will be made the day of the programs, so please check our website and/or social media for updates.