Laura Poitras “9/11 Trilogy”
Artists Space
This event has ended.
Coinciding with the worldwide release of Laura Poitras’ widely anticipated and critically acclaimed documentary CITIZENFOUR, Artists Space presents an exhibition dedicated to the filmmaker’s 9/11 Trilogy, featuring her previous features My Country, My Country, and The Oath as well as three short films The Program, Death of a Prisoner, and PRISM: Snowden Interview. Together with CITIZENFOUR, these films rigorously document and address the expansion of the security state in the aftermath of 9/11.
The 9/11 Trilogy considers, both obliquely and directly, a period in which access to information, and agency in relation to that information, has become contested ground among governments, citizens, security agencies, and the media. The films collectively raise vital questions around the role of critical visual culture at a historical juncture at which the construction of a social imaginary of “freedom” is positioned at odds with transparency and accountability.
My Country, My Country (2006), The Oath (2010) and CITIZENFOUR all revolve around individuals whose lives, in differing ways, have become intrinsically tied to the “war on terror” and U.S. military operations overseas. Each film stems from an encounter between Poitras and one of these people: Dr. Riyadh al-Adhadh, a Sunni electoral candidate in the 2005 Iraqi elections in Baghdad; Abu Jandal, a taxi-driver in Sana’a, Yemen, who had previously served as bodyguard to Osama bin Laden; and Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency computing systems contractor turned whistleblower. The writer Janet Malcolm has posited that: “The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise.” Poitras’ films highlight the complexity at the heart of practices of journalism and reportage, in the light of contemporary ideological struggles between state and citizen. They also crucially trace unfolding relations between U.S. political and military interventions, and individual positions of resistance, as knotted sites of belief and oppression.
Screening Hours:
My Country, My Country and The Oath
noon, 2pm and 4pm daily
Media
Schedule
from December 14, 2014 to February 15, 2015
See Description
Opening Reception on 2014-12-13 from 18:00 to 20:00