MoMA Modern Mondays Announced For November and December 2011

Modern Mondays is a program that brings contemporary, innovative film and moving-image works to the public and provides a forum for viewers to engage in dialogue and debate with contemporary filmmakers and artists. Modern Mondays presents new-and newly rediscovered-film and media works with the director in attendance, stimulating discourse, dialogue, and interaction in a social setting.

Modern Mondays
November and December 2011
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

NEWLY SCHEDULED
An Evening with Zefrey Throwell
November 14, 7:00 p.m.
New York-based artist Zefrey Throwell (American, b. 1975) uses film, painting, and performance to convey his vision of modern America and highlight "the failure of communication" in our age. Active in art circles since 2003, Throwell recently came to prominence through his performance/protest piece Ocularpation: Wall Street, which foreshadowed the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests, and the subsequent global expansion of the "Occupy" movement. In this call for more transparency on Wall Street, Throwell and 49 collaborators dressed up as employees of various Wall Street businesses, and then stripped off their costumes to reveal their naked bodies. The five-minute performance, staged in August 2011, now comes to MoMA as a short film directed by Throwell that "reveals" the events of that morning. Ocularpation: Wall Street (2011) will be screened along with a number of Throwell's other films, including a film of his original statement against "cubicle enslavement," Ocularpation: One - San Francisco (2008).

Organized by Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator, and Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film.

An Evening with Moyra Davey
December 5, 7:00 p.m.
Moyra Davey (Canadian, b. 1958), a New York-based photographer, filmmaker, writer, and curator featured in the MoMA exhibition New Photography 2011, on view through January 16, 2012, presents the New York premiere of her latest moving-image work, Les Goddesses (2011). She writes that "Les Goddesses began as an inquiry into the validity of storytelling, specifically: telling one's own story, and the ambivalence surrounding this drive. The 'story' or some part of it, is finally enabled by the discovery of a series of coincidences that connect the lives and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters, and my five sisters, via a series of portraits I took of them in the early 1980s. Unexpectedly, the vicissitudes of photography, as I've practiced it over the last 30 years, become a central theme of Les Goddesses." Davey will also present a short excerpt from Jennifer Montgomery's work-in-progress, One Species Removed, which resonates with Les Goddesses in fascinating and moving ways. Montgomery will join Davey for a discussion after the screening.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film.

An Evening with Juan Daniel
December 19, 7:00 p.m.
Juan Daniel (Peruvian, b. 1987) presents the New York premiere of his "neurological feature," Reminiscencias (Reminiscences) (2010), which explores identity, autobiography, and the creation and loss of memory. In this documentary, a young man suffering from amnesia uses 8mm home movies and videos from his cell phone to puzzle out his own history. Is this dramatic process reality, or is it a canny fiction? The screening is followed by a discussion.

Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film.

RESCHEDULED
An Evening with Dan Graham
January 23, 7:00 p.m.
Dan Graham (American, b. 1942) has pioneered Conceptual, performance, and video art since the mid-1960s, producing a profoundly influential body of work and theory that has helped to shape the direction and practice of contemporary art over the past four decades. Beginning in 1965, Graham took a series of color snap-shots in suburban New Jersey and New York, using a Kodak Instamatic fixed focus camera. Referring to Minimalist reduction and seriality, Graham utilized the 35mm slide format as a repeatable "art structure" in and of itself. The resulting slide projection, Homes for America, premiered in the exhibition Projected Art at New York City's Finch College Museum of Art in 1966. For this evening, Dan Graham will present and discuss this work, which was acquired and recently restored by MoMA. In addition, Graham will speak about his early "proto-Conceptual" art dealing with magazine pages. MoMA added a substantial number of Graham's text pieces and works intended as interventions in magazines through the recent acquisition of The Daled Collection of American and European Conceptual Art.

Organized by Sabine Breitwieser, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art.

Tickets: $12 adults; $10 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D.; $8 full?time students with current I.D. (For admittance to film programs only.) The price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket when a film ticket stub is presented at the Lobby Information Desk within 30 days of the date on the stub (does not apply during Target Free Friday Nights, 4:00-8:00 p.m.). Admission is free for Museum members and for Museum ticketholders.