Surface Connection: Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler

SURFACE CONNECTION: Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler

Selected video + performance work by Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan. The program will include a screening of Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan’s collaborative video work and a live audiovisual performance of Surface Connection. Surface Connection explores the concept of queer space, the non-human, and their relationship to queer bodies through a series of audiovisual intra-actions where we touch/excite surfaces and objects. Through this performance, we investigate the question of how “queering” happens when non-human and human bodies intra-act with one another in a complex audiovisual ecosystem. In our performance, we channel our camp sensibility and  create performative actions by collaborating with the non-human. By amplifying the vibrated surfaces (such as a reflective mylar) through the close-up cameras and microphones, we “disrupt” the assumption of how bodies move in space, and we “deviate” bodies from their normative representations and their linear paths.

This program is curated by Anto(n) Astudillo, Program Director for Millennium Film Workshop. Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler have been collaborating since 2017, creating audiovisual performances that investigate everyday objects, concepts of agency and queer potentiality. Their collaborative work has been shown in numerous festivals and venues such as Revolutions Per Minute, Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music, Transient Visions, Light Matter, Athens International Film + Video, Intermediale Festival of Audiovisual Forms, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Festival ECRÃ, Fisura, International Festival of Experimental Film & Video and forthcoming CURRENTS New Media Festival. Duncan and Pirler performed their audiovisual performance, “Surface Connection” at the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival's Expanded Cinema program and exhibited their work in the LEAF2023 Sync Exhibition. They have been artists-in-residence at Signal Culture (Owego, NY), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred, NY) and LMCC at Governors Island (NYC). Most recently, Duncan and Pirler were awarded the 2024 New Works Artist Residency for their  multimedia performance installation “Plasticity.” www.senempirler.com www.monicaduncan.net