Amber Bemak and Nadia Granados: In Person

Tuesday, 10/19, 7:15 PM

Nadia Granados and Amber Bemak are filmmakers and performance artists, and began their collaboration in 2014. Themes of their work center around relations between Latin and North America, queer love and loss in a cross cultural context, and the political ramifications of patriarchal, imperialist power. Their work has been seen at the Tamayo Museum, Oberhausen International Film Festival, Muestra Marrana, and OUTsider festival among other venues. Granados lives and works in Bogotá, and Bemak is based in Dallas.

Amber Bemak is a filmmaker, artist, and educator. Her work is based in experimental and documentary film and also spans performance art and curatorial practice. She has co-directed and produced two feature documentaries on Tibetan Buddhism, as well as created 15 short experimental and documentary films that have played and won awards in numerous festivals internationally. 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 in all areas, and Buddhist philosophical frameworks and cultures. She has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States. Her work has been seen at venues including the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Rubin Museum of Art, and SculptureCenter, as well as the Tamayo Museum and Oberhausen International Film Festival. She has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico and the United States.

Nadia Granados is originally from Colombia. Her work explores the relationships between traditional pornography and violence and is both performative and technological, art and activism, and a mix of cabaret, intervention, and streaming video. In all of her work, she uses her body to detonate, opening up new pathways of action and shifting consciences. Among the many awards she has received are the Franklin Furnace Fund, the 3rd Visual Arts Biennial Bogotá Prize, and the FONCA award for Colombia-Mexico artist residencies. Her work has been presented in Canadá, Venezuela, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Berlín, Ecuador, Argentina, Perú, the United States, Mexico, Korea, Brazil, and Colombia.

Tell Me When You Die 2015, Mexico, United States, 12 min.

Tell Me When You Die is the first part of a performance video trilogy, created and performed by Nadia Granados (Colombia/Mexico) and Amber Bemak (United States).This work explores the juxtapositions between physical limitations and freedom, in both political and corporal contexts. Tell Me When You Die is about walking until you disappear into space. Being swallowed by sea, sky, or earth and the claustrophobia and intimacy of being surrounded by nature. We consider penetration as a cinematic rhythm, and experiment/perform being penetrated by air, water, fingers, and text. Thinking about porn as a genre which can be empowering or degrading in its’ engagement with women and their bodies, we use our own bodies to picture these extremes, at times our bodies are performing power and at times they are not.

Borderhole 2017, Mexico, Colombia, United States, 14 min.

Borderhole takes place on a mythical border area between Colombia and the United States. We investigate the relationship between North and South America through the lens of the American Dream and the illumination of multiple tensions in and around the border. The piece explores imperialism, globalization through pop music, gender mutation in an international context, and the choreography of women’s bodies in relation to sociopolitical and ecosystems.

Goodbye Fantasy 2019, Mexico, Colombia, United States, 15 min.

Goodbye Fantasy is about two bodies in relation to each other as they let go of multiple cinematic universes they occupy together. Transforming from a fantasy body to a dreaming body to a dying body, they enact different constellations of social and political power as they relate to each other within the tight construct of the frame.

All works distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinema