Tag: Filmmaker

Annalisa Barron’s art in motion: In conversation with the artist

Claudia Pretelin

With a background in music, film, and visual arts, Annalisa Barron’s itinerant practice is currently established in Rochester, NY where she is developing an ongoing research-based project called Place Projectors. For this body of work, the artist creates cinematic sculptures made of light, shadow, steel, and glass informed by Rochester’s unique imaging history. I met Annalisa Barron in 2018 at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center where she presented The Molok, a performance and object offering of a 13-foot-tall creature, operated by puppeteers in harnesses and quad stilts and made entirely…

Borderless: A conversation with Mara Ahmed, Part 2

Claudia Pretelin

On May 11, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, I received Mara Ahmed’s email with her responses to our conversation. At the time, some media outlets were starting to give attention to the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old African-American man fatally shot while jogging in Glynn County, Georgia. Since then, we’ve seen George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and learned about Breonna Taylor’s tragic death in Louisville, Kentucky, among many other cases of violence against black people in this country. As a team, Instruments of Memory has joined…

Borderless: A conversation with Mara Ahmed, Part 1

Claudia Pretelin

In August 1947, the Indian subcontinent was divided into two independent nation-states: Hindu majority-India and Muslim majority-Pakistan. The Partition was one of the largest recorded migrations of the 20th century. It forced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs to journey hundreds of miles, resulting in the displacement of approximately 20 million people and an estimate of more than one million killed. This was a pivotal moment for thousands of families and their generations to come. Their stories were defined by the legacy of this violent separation. One of these stories belongs to…