Join us for the return of Breaking Codes, a weekend-long event that highlights emerging moving image makers who are building radical, expansive and wholly new definitions of cinematic form. This year we are thrilled to welcome Nick Briz, NIA JUNE, and Amina Ross and explore their work over the course of four free events.
The SNF Parkway Theatre is proud to present eight short video works by artist Amina Ross as part of Breaking Codes 2022. Ross's work comes from a place of acute sensitivity. Sensitivity to images, sounds, feelings, histories, and fellow artists and collaborators. Ross's work encompasses oceans of emotional and spiritual connections, all while working in what can otherwise be considered cold and unfeeling digital space. Combining new media and digital video tactics, Ross confidently weaves stories, songs, poems, and dreamscapes into moving experiential artworks that posit new modes of relating to oppressive power structures big and small. Ross's screening will include live accompaniment by Bao Nguyen and a post-screening conversation will moderated by Patricia Nguyen.
Amina Ross is an artist, educator, and lifelong learner. Ross makes videos, sculptures, sounds, and situations that consider feeling, embodied knowledge, and intimacy as survival technologies for black, queer, trans, and feminine-spectrum people. Their work questions how systems of power condition reality and how communities facing oppression navigate, resist, reimagine, and refigure these systems to thrive in safety. Ross worked as an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a critic at Rhode Island School of Design. They received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. They have recently exhibited work at Sentiment (Zurich, CH), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Iceberg Projects (Chicago, IL), M23 (New York, NY), Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore, MD), and Centro De Cultura Digital (Mexico City, MX) among other venues. Ross was a recent artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting (Madison, ME), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Abrons Art Center (New York, NY), and Harvestworks (New York, NY).
Bao Nguyen (they/them) is a performance artist, experimental vocalist and curator born in Vietnam and based in Baltimore. They are pursuing their BFA in Interactive Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. Bao recently completed their residency at Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. They have exhibited in the U.S and abroad, including shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Ewha Woman University, Korea. In 2022, they were awarded the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award from the New Media Caucus. Through performance, sound, video and interactive media, Bao’s practice examines oral traditions to reconsider the history of Vietnamese nation-building and devise new ways of connecting to a landscape, to ourselves and to each other.
Patricia Nguyen, Ph.D. is an artist, scholar, and educator traversing between Chicago and Charlottesville. She is an Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Virginia. She earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research and performance work examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics with diasporic communities to explore the impacts of state violence, forced migration, and intergenerational trauma while creating other worlds. Community based praxis and experimentation is a fundamental ethos of her work as an artist and scholar committed to abolition. Dr. Nguyen has published work in Women Studies Quarterly, Harvard Kennedy School's Asian American Policy Review, Women and Performance, Journal of Asian American Studies, AmerAsia, and The Funambulist. In recent news, Dr. Nguyen is an award-winning memorial designer for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, the first monument in the United States to honor survivors of police violence.
See all the programs that are part of Breaking Codes 2022!
Friday, December 9
7 pm - Nia June Screening with Q&A
Saturday, December 10
4 pm - Nick Briz Artist Talk with Q&A
7 pm - Amina Ross Screening with Q&A
Sunday, December 11
2 pm - Tactical Misuse Workshop with Nick Briz
Breaking Codes is made possible by a generous contribution from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
COVID-19 POLICIES
- Face masks are required at all times in the SNF Parkway except when consuming concessions in your seat.
- Patrons are strongly encouraged to avoid the theater if they are feeling unwell or have had a recent unmasked exposure to someone who tested positive. Email info@mdfilmfest.com with any questions.