“I’m working haltingly on this essay while simultaneously undergoing treatment for optic neuritis in my left eye. My doctors are kind people who especially want to help me because I am a photographer; my ophthalmologist collects Leicas and is always eager to discuss optics and lenses and uses the terminology of f-stops and “shutting down” to describe the darkened perceptions of my affected eye. I don’t tell my doctors that my production of photographs has dwindled to a trickle, that I’ve grown melancholic and ambivalent about photography.”
(Moyra Davey, Index Cards, p. 89)
Moyra Davey is a storyteller. This is evident not only in her later films but already in her best known photographic work featuring friends and family, as well as the detritus of daily life like dusty surfaces, stacks of vinyl records, or scratched, worn-away pennies, where the passing of time and the traces of real or imagined human lives take centre stage.
Her work as a visual artist is as much informed by observation as by literature. Davey is an avid reader and a prolific writer, connecting intellectual reflections on the work of well-known artists, writers and philosophers to her most personal experiences and intimate situations. In the mid-2000s, Davey began focusing on moving image works that often feature personal narratives delivered by the artist at a meditative pace.
Moyra Davey (1958, Toronto) is a New York-based artist whose work spans photography, film and writing. She has produced several films, a series of photographs, and multiple artist’s books. She is the author of The Problem of Reading (2003), Burn the Diaries (2014), Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest (2017), I Confess (2020), and more recently, Index Cards (2020). Her work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Tate in the UK. She is a 2020 recipient of the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Programme:
17:00 Introduction by Sapieha Palace curator Inesa Brašiškė and guest curator Justina Zubaitė-Bundzė.
i confess, 2019, 56’46’’
This film triangulates the lives and work of three writers: the American novelist and essayist James Baldwin, the Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières, and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux. During the film’s making, Davey arrived at the work of each figure in succession, with Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country as her point of departure. As the film progresses, a thread connecting themes of race and poverty, language and nationalism is established, while Davey entwines a personal chronicle of the 1960s–70s – a turbulent period in Québécois history marked by separatism and violence that remains unresolved today.
Break
19:00
Notes on Blue, 2015, 28’
A commission about the English artist Derek Jarman, Notes on Blue, reflects Davey’s responses to Jarman’s work and legacy as a filmmaker, gardener, political activist and, perhaps most significantly for Davey, writer.
Forks & Spoons, 2024, 26’18’’
This film centres on the photographic work of Justine Kurland, Shala Miller, Alix Cléo Roubaud, Carla Williams, and Francesca Woodman. All five artists are also poets, wordsmiths – keepers of diaries, writers of letters, essays and plays. Davey says: ‘My preference for looking at photographs is always within books: recent passions are for the artist-books of Justine Kurland and Shala Miller, and a posthumous publication of Alix Cléo Roubaud. Viewing these works, and the ways the artists use their bodies and their words, inevitably led to Francesca Woodman, and her talismanic monograph of 1986.’ By recreating and reflecting on their photographs, Davey creates a meditation on the female body, desire, and artistic creation, while simultaneously reflecting on her own limitations and shortcomings in the process.
This programme is curated together with Justina Zubaitė-Bundzė.
Justina Zubaitė-Bundzė is the founder of Six Chairs Books, a bookstore and publishing house, and until recently served as Head of the CAC Reading Room. She is a member of the Paviljonas Book Festival curatorial team and has co-organised the Lithuanian Visual Art Criticism Awards. Zubaitė-Bundzė is the chief curator of April, Lithuania’s first international residency programme dedicated exclusively to writers.
The works will be screened in the original language.
Total duration: 3 hours.
Content warning: These films include scenes that some viewers may find disturbing.