Guest curated by artist Sarah Durcan, Land Films is a series of films featuring the work of Joan Jonas, Deborah Stratman and Ana Vaz. As Durcan notes about these works, filming the land makes a curious relationship with time as the time of the film meets the scale of geological time. The films of Jonas, Stratman and Vaz bring us into encounters with time and space and the laws of a natural world that resists full knowability or human dominion. Avoiding the imperial views of ‘landscapes’, their films tune into what lies beneath and above the land: subtle frequencies, rhythms, the laws of physics, buried histories and the radical mysteries of rock, water, land and sky.
Land Films is part of a series of guest curated screenings for Living Canvas at IMMA, where artists, curators, and organisations working with film and moving image are invited to contribute to the outdoor screening programme.
Land Films in order of appearance:
Joan Jonas, Songdelay (1973), 18:35 minutes
Ana Vaz, Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas/Amérika: Bay of Arrows (2016) 8:46 minutes
Deborah Stratman, Last Things (2023), 49 minutes
Deborah Stratman, Otherhood (2023), 3 minutes
About the films
Joan Jonas
Songdelay, 1973
B&W, sound, original format: 16mm film, 18:35 minutes
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
For the 1973 work Songdelay, staged on a riverfront in Lower Manhattan, NYC, fourteen performers struck together pieces of wood, drew shapes on the ground with props, and used mirrors to refract sunlight while an audience watched from afar. The discrepancy between these visible actions and the sounds that reached the audience expresses the depth of the landscape. This was further amplified by the artist’s use of wide-angle and telephoto lenses—the latter enabling close ups—in the resulting film. Songdelay demonstrates Jonas’s interest in space and, in her words, “ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it.” Text via moma.org – MoMA gallery label from Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, March 17–July 6, 2024.
Credits:
Camera: Robert Fiore.
Editors: Robert Fiore, Joan Jonas.
Sound Technician: Kurt Munkacsi.
Performers: Ariel Bach, Marion Cajuri, James Cobb, Carol Gooden, Randy Hardy, Michael Harvey, Glenda Hydler, Joan Jonas, EP Kotkas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Oliver, Steve Paxton, Penelope, James Reineking, Robin Winters.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Credits courtesy eai.org
Ana Vaz
Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas/Amérika: Bay of Arrows, 2016
HD video, colour, sound, single screen, ratio 16:9, 8:46 minutes
1492. A European ship approaches the coast of Samaná and is met with a rain of arrows. Centuries later, beneath the heat shimmer of Lake Enriquillo—named after the Caribbean cacique Taíno who rose against colonial incursion—an expanding coral desert lays bare the lake’s geologic past: charred trunks standing rigid, species receding with the vanishing shoreline. The camera, cast forward, spins in orbit: becoming arrow, becoming witness. Across scorched ground and suspended time, Amérika: Bay of Arrows summons a response to conquest that never ceased, cast into a perpetual falling sky.
Credits:
Image, Sound and Edit: Ana Vaz
With: Guarionex Léger
Made with the support of: Davidoff Art Initiative
Deborah Stratman
Last Things, 2023
Original format: 16mm film, ratio: 1:1.33, B&W/Colour, 49 minutes
Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures. Text courtesy the artist and LUX, London.
Deborah Stratman
Otherhood, 2023
Original format: 16mm film, ratio: 4:3, 16mm xfer to HD; Colour, 3 minutes
Mother and child confront the other. Meanwhile, some ladies are thinking.Text courtesy the artist and LUX, London.
About the artists
An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas engages in an elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity. Employing an idiosyncratic vocabulary of ritualised gesture and symbolic objects that include masks, mirrors, and costuming, she explores the self and the body through layers of meaning. Text courtesy eai.org
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker whose film-poems are marked by a constant experimental defiance to the poetic forms of contemporary cinema, highlighting the destructive practices of colonial modernity. She is the author of films and installations such as “It Is Night in America”, “Apiyemiyekî?” extensively presented in film festivals and cultural institutions such as Locarno; New York Film Festival; MoMa Doc Fortnight; Tate Modern; Secession; Palais de Tokyo; Jeu de Paume; among others.
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. Stratman has exhibited internationally including at MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY) and has done site-specific projects with spaces such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls, Mercer Union and Ballroom Marfa. Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom. She is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts. Stratman lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois. Text courtesy Video Data Bank.
About the Invited Curator
Sarah Durcan is an artist and filmmaker based in Dublin, whose practice is informed by discourses of intergenerational memory, ‘documentary fictions’ and intersectional feminism. In 2025, Durcan was a Fulbright Scholar at the Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute Chicago. Other recent work and exhibitions include The Invisibles, a Platform Commission, 40th EVA International selected by Emily Jacir and Pádraic E. Moore (2023), touring to The Dock, Carrig on Shannon (2024) and Goethe Institut (2024), and featuring in Periodical Review 14, Pallas Projects, Dublin (2024 – 2025), curated by Mark Cullen, Gavin Murphy, Miguel Amado and Valeria Ceregini.
Durcan’s book Memory and Intermediality in Artists’ Moving Image (2021) addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists’ moving image installations. She is a lecturer and MFA Programme Leader, School of Fine Art, NCAD, and a recipient of numerous awards and residencies.
