The SF Art Book Fair is an annual multi-day festival celebrating artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, zines, printed ephemera and artists' multiples. Presented this year at San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project July 20–22, the 2018 iteration features an astonishing curated cast of over 100 independent publishers, antiquarian dealers, artists, collectors, and enthusiasts as well as a diverse range of talks, discussions, book launches, on and off-site special projects, exhibitions and signings. The SF Art Book Fair is FREE and open to the public.
For 2018, San Francisco Cinematheque joins forces with Canyon Cinema at SFABF to present an array of collectible publications (for perusal and purchase), including issues of Cinematograph, Cinematheque’s occasional journal, vintage and recent issues of the Canyon Cinema News, rare artist publications, ‘zines, program note compendia, limited edition monographs and more.
In addition, (and at no extra charge!), Cinematheque and Canyon present screenings of 16mm film and media works all weekend-long. Full details on the weekend’s screenings here.
11am: So Is This (1982) by Michael Snow; 16mm, color, silent, 45 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
“With formalist belligerence, So Is This threatens to make its viewers ‘laugh, cry and change society,’ even promising to get ‘confessional.’” (Canyon Cinema)
12pm: Fluid Frontiers (2017) by Ephraim Asili; digital video, color, sound, 23 minutes, exhibition file from the maker
Fluid Frontiers is the fifth and final film in Ephraim Asili’s Diaspora Suite, a series of films exploring the artist’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River and featuring readings from Detroit’s renowned Broadside Press and artworks by Detroit Artists, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between resistance and liberation. All the film’s poems are read from original Broadside Press editions by natives of the Detroit, Michigan/Windsor, Ontario region. (Ephraim Asili)
12:30pm: The Sun Quartet, part 4: November 2/Far from Ayotzinapa (2017) by Colectivo Los ingrávidos; digital video, color, sound, 23 minutes, exhibition file from the makers
The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, political composition in four natural elements, kinematic composition in four body mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And finally the clamor of the people who after the night of September 26, 2014 shook Mexico. The massive disappearance of 43 students of Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body. The Sun Quartet is a cinematographic composition of this event.
November 2/Far from Ayotzinapa: The clamor of the people after the disappearance of 43 students of Ayotzinapa. The Mexican poet David Huerta wrote a poem called Ayotzinapa on November 2, a date is a very important date of in Mexico, because is the celebration of “Day of the Dead.” The poem is about the experience of current Mexican war. (Colectivo Los ingrávidos)
1pm: Canyon Cinema’s Drive-Thru Cinema, part 1: one of three mini-micro programs: 15 films on 16mm spanning 40 years in 40min (works by Chick Strand, Robert Breer, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, and and many more…)
2pm: the word, my dear: text moving in time
Echoing a similar program presented by Cinematheque in 2013, this program presents works in which written text is visualized and plasticized, explored and displayed, a thumbnail catalog of the diverse expressive potentialities of language’s graphic notation displayed as light moving in time. All works drawn from the collection of Canyon Cinema and projected in 16mm.
SCREENING: I… Dreaming (1988) by Stan Brakhage; Gently Down the Stream (1981) by Su Friedrich; Hardwood Process (1996) by David Gatten; Word Movie (1966) by Paul Sharits;
3pm: Jeffrey Skoller’s The Malady of Death
(Jeffrey Skoller in person)
“[…] an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ story of the same name […] which is a particular reading of the story in which word and image, in a complex interplay, explore male sexuality. […] The male ‘you’ is multiplied[…]. The ‘she’ the ‘difference,’ is literally absent from the image but present metaphorically, 'possessed' but not known. While societal connections between possessing sexuality, economically, and by force are explored in relation to male sexuality, the implication of the act of looking permeate all these discourses[…]” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive)
4pm: I Am Not Here (CROSSROADS capsule 1)
sair goetz in person
One of several programs presented during SFABF as an echo of Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS festival 2018, the films in I Am Not Here include works of self- and other-portraiture, fragmented bodies, abstracted spaces, ritual exorcisms of trauma and enactment of feminist art actions.
SCREENING: me and my army (2017) by sair goetz; Water/Mist/Fire/Off (2017) by Youngzoo Im; Model of a Hand (2018) by Rosa John; I AM NOT HERE FOR YOU (2017) by Nico LaShae.
5pm: Canyon Cinema’s Drive-Thru Cinema, part 2: one of three mini-micro programs: 11 films on 16mm spanning 40 years in 40min (works by Bruce Baillie, Robert Nelson, Kenneth Anger, Alice Anne Parker and many more…)
Pictured above: Gently Down the Stream (2017) by Su Friedrich