14: Kevin Jerome Everson

2 April, 2017 - 12:00
Sphinx cinema

 

 

SELECTION 2017

A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.

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Ears, Nose & Throat

Kevin Jerome Everson
,
US
,
2016
,
HD
,
10'

In Kevin Jerome Everson’s deeply affecting Ears, Nose and Throat, a woman’s testimonial faculties are confirmed through medical examinations before she recites a tragic story, whose horrors we don’t see, hear, or smell, but can imagine far too easily.

Tonsler Park

Kevin Jerome Everson
,
US
,
2017
,
16mm
,
80'

This portrait of Afro-American staff members of the polling station at Tonsler Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, was filmed during the US Presidential Election Day on 8 November 2016, the day when the battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was decided. Kevin Jerome Everson records the staff taking oaths, rows of voters passing as they hand out voting slips, while no one seems aware of the camera that is standing there, motionless. Conversations change to hubbub, backs block the camera’s view. This is democracy in practice and every vote counts. The film slowly opens a space for those who so often remain invisible, and the location is itself not without significance: Tonsler Park is named after Benjamin Tonsler, a local Afro-American school director who defied the rules to continue to teach older Afro-Americans in the era of segregation. With a sense of place and historical research, Kevin Jerome Everson’s films combine scripted and documentary elements with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks generated by certain conditions in the lives of working-class African Americans and others of African descent.