Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs to stream online starting May 8

Wed, Apr 29, 2020

Limited online screening co-presented with Vielmetter Los Angeles

The Wexner Center for the Arts and Vielmetter Los Angeles are excited to co-present a limited online screening of Stanya Kahn’s most recent short film, No Go Backs (2020). Available for viewing for one week, the 16mm film is a timely vision of a world on the edge of collapse and the young people set to inherit it. Because the film’s current exhibition at the center and its opening at Vielmetter Los Angeles are both on hold due to the global pandemic, Kahn wanted to offer the film for a preview viewing for everyone sheltering in place. The film will be streaming on Vielmetter’s website May 8–15. (Update: the run has been extended through May 24.)

A live conversation on Zoom with Wex Associate Curator of Exhibitions Lucy I. Zimmerman and Film/Video Studio Curator Jennifer Lange will take place on Wednesday, May 13 at 7 PM EDT. (RSVP is required; a link will be made available in the coming days.)

Trailer, No Go Backs, 2020, Super 16 mm film transferred to 2K video, TRT 33:13. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles

 

A 33-minute short, shot on super 16mm with an original soundscore and no dialogue, No Go Backs follows two teenagers (and real-life friends) who leave the city for the wild, only haphazardly prepared. From the heart of the city, they cut an arduous path along sites of California’s historic water wars, traveling north into the monumental landscapes of the Eastern Sierra. In the haunted precarity of a collapsed world, the kids travel in dreamlike states of distraction, malaise, and resilience. As they eventually encounter other kids along shared roads and the prospect of camaraderie in facing the unknown, the film becomes a compressed, allegorical epic about an entire generation that must make a new way forward.

No Go Backs includes music by Alexia Riner, Insect Ark, Eli.So.Drippy, Stanya Kahn, Lil Peep and Brian Eno. The film was made with the support of a residency in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio.

 

About Stanya Kahn

Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in film and video with a practice that includes drawing, sound, writing, performance, sculpture, and installation. Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film and Video. Recent solo exhibitions include Stand in the Stream, MoMA PS1, New York; I can clearly see yer nuts, The New Museum, New York; Stand in the Stream, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA; Stanya Kahn: Die Laughing, Marlborough Gallery, New York; Stanya Kahn, Weiss, Berlin, Germany; Heatstroke, The Pit, Los Angeles; It's Cool, I'm Good, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. Select group exhibitions include The Gwangju Biennial (’18), Gwangju, South Korea; Edens Edge, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, The New Museum, New York; Laugh-In: Art, Comedy, Performance, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; Los Angeles – A Fiction, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway; California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA. Her collaborative work with Harry Dodge has shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery New York; The 2008 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; ZKM/Center for Art and Media, Karlsrhe, Germany, among others. She was a contributing writer and actor in feature film By Hook or By Crook (2001). Her work is in the collections of The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Goetz Collection, Munchen, Germany; among others.