This #FilmFridays feature is Shahzia Sikander’s film, Parallax, 2013. Click the link below to watch on Vimeo for 24 hours from Friday, May 8 until Saturday, May 9.
Join us on social media and tag @SeanKellyNY and #Parallax to share a pic of your at-home screening. The person who submits the winning picture of them watching the film will receive a signed copy of #ShahziaSikander’s publication.
Parallax is a monumental three-channel single-image audio-visual video animation created from hundreds of hand-drawn watercolor, gouache and ink paintings. Created in 2013 for the Sharjah Biennial 11, Parallax was inspired by Shahzia Sikander’s journey through the unique landscape of the United Arab Emirates. Parallax investigates interdisciplinary visual and verbal languages, migration patterns, cultural quarantine, and the flux of human identity. Motifs, trenchant historical symbols and poet’s words are given shifting identities as they come together to cultivate new associations through movement, repetition, velocity, and magnitude, challenging perceptions around historical narratives, conflict, omission, and loss. The animation’s original score, produced in collaboration with 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, creates tension and rhythm, whilst poets from Sharjah recite and narrate classical and colloquial Arabic texts.