CADVC welcomes guest curator Joanna Raczynska for her future project, Just Past: Using Documentation. Dates will soon be announced.

Organized by Visiting Curator, Joanna Raczynska, Just Past: Using Documentation presents a series of films and videos that utilize the subjective as well as mediated experiences of performance, exploring some of the many uses of video, film and audio documentation by artists, organizations, and collectives since the late 60s. The film and video presentations will contextualize questions regarding the concept of live performances and subjective experience; actions by Activist-Artists; histories of artist-run experimental media spaces and happenings; “professional” and “amateur” documentation and their purposes; copyright, archives, access and video format migration; and the experiences of projectionists, media arts curators and artists performing multiple roles in the making of meaning and history, among other concepts. The series will also work towards provoking a more active participation in the documentation of current artistic practices, organizations, and events.

Composed of six individual programs, Just Past: Using Documentation will feature screenings and guest speakers addressing very specific aspects about the production and uses of documentation including: Imagining the Documented with project organizer Joanna Raczynska, Franklin Furnace: The Art of Performance Documentation with founder and artist Martha Wilson in person, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center’s archive footage of Mike Kelley’s The Monitor and the Merrimac (1981) with Carolyn Tennant (archivist), Tony Conrad, and Tony Ousler in person, We’re All VideoFreex!: Archiving Utopia with Skip Blumberg and Tom Colley (archivist) in person, Gravity Hill Newsreels, serialized footage from Occupy Wall Street with filmmaker Jem Cohen in person, and final screening at Charles.

Joanna Raczynska is the Assistant Head of Film Programs in the Department of Film Programs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She earned her master’s degree in documentary by practice from Royal Holloway College, University of London in 2001. She first started making non-fiction films ands videos in 1996, while a student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her works have screened internationally and across the United States, most recently at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. She has previously worked for a variety of non-profit organizations including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY (where she served as Media Arts Director from 2002 – 2006), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Joanna Raczynska