TBA:21 "Conviction" by Jennie MaryTai Liu & Simon Liu with Andrew Gilbert

Jennie MaryTai Liu & Simon Liu with Andrew Gilbert
(New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles)

Conviction

Directed by Jennie MaryTai Liu & Simon Liu with sound by Andrew Gilbert

World Premiere: Conviction

World Premiere: force and Sistern (16mm, HD & AE Animation) (expanded versions)

force (16mm & AE Animation, 9 minutes) premiered at the New York Film Festival 2020

DESCRIPTION
A tightly choreographed machine regulates the terrain of how breath and movement may flow, promising order, accountability, and green space. Words fall over a city, making control concrete. An adolescent shield absorbs, distorts, purges in the night, becomes a reservoir for a death dance. Between layers of oppressive weather, fantasy screens fears and futures, suffocating/sad, noncompliant, wielding/wearing symbols/cymbals, washed in rain.

Made by Hong Kong-raised sister/brother artists Jennie MaryTai Liu and Simon Liu with sound by Portland-raised artist Andrew Gilbert, this video installation contains two films, force (16mm & AE Animation) and Sistern (HD & AE Animation), shot in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2021 respectively.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jennie MaryTai Liu is an artist working across performance, choreography, video, and writing. She has worked in institutions and artist-run spaces including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources, The Mistake Room, The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, PICA, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. She is currently organizing a 2022 performance exhibition funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation engaging LA dance artists to respond to modern dance activity in early twentieth-century LA. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group.

Simon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker working between alternate documentary forms, abstract diary films, 16mm projection performance, and video installation. He has exhibited at film festivals and institutions globally including the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, British Film Institute, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, “Dreamlands: Expanded,” and a solo presentation at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s quadruple 16mm projection “Highview” with other recent works for their Permanent Collections. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.

Andrew Gilbert is a Los Angeles-based performer, musician, and teacher. In 2007 he co-founded Poor Dog Group, an experimental performance collective with whom he has developed six works as a sound designer and performer, performing in venues including REDCAT, the Experimental Media and Performance Art Center (EMPAC), The Getty Villa, Grotowski Institute in Poland, Bitef Theater in Serbia, and the Pula International Theater Festival in Croatia. House Music, an ongoing co-creation with choreographer Jennie Liu, is a performance for 16 guests rooted in an ongoing study of Japanese tea ceremony and has been performed since 2014 at venues including Prelude Festival, Live Arts Exchange, HomeLA, The Mistake Room, and the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. He most recently designed sound for choreographer Faye Driscoll's Thank You for Coming: Space. Andrew is one-half of the band Royal Auditorium. @royalauditorium @andrewgilbertindependentartist