Kim? Contemporary Art Centre announces public programme of the exhibition All flesh is grass: online screening of Kirlian Witness aka The Plants are Watching and Of Animacy Reading Group online session.
Online Screening:
The Kirlian Witness (aka The Plants are Watching), Jonathan Sarno, 1978, 73:00, USA Presented with a video introduction by Kier-La Janisse, founder of Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.
Available online at kim.lv
29.06 – 06.07.2020
Available online for one week, view the feature film The Kirlian Witness (aka The Plants are Watching ) by Jonathan Sarno, with a video introduction by Kier-La Janisse, founder of Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.
The film is a key reference to the All Flesh is Grass project on view at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre. Janisse writes of the film: ‘[I]mportantly, The Secret Life of Plants would act as the impetus for what remains the only horror film to foreground plant communication in crime-solving: Jonathan Sarno’s 1978 film The Kirlian Witness – later retitled The Plants are Watching – which is a deliberately paced, ethereal thriller set in a long-vanished version of New York City, with a score by a pre-Friday the 13 th Harry Manfredini. A woman (Nancy Boykin) who owns a plant shop (in reality Plantworks, in its original location at the corner of Mercer and Waverly in Manhattan) and has an empathic relationship with a plant, is murdered – with only the plant as a witness. Her photographer sister (Nancy Snyder, who was then part of the Circle Repertory Company run by Lanford Wilson) adopts the plant following her sister’s death, and upon reading the book The Secret Life of Plants, begins investigating her sister’s death through various methods of communication with the plant, including Kirlian photography, ESP, and polygraph indicators.’ – Kier-La Janisse, ‘Murder Season: The Strange World of Vegetal Detecting’, byNWR, Vol. 5, (2019)
Reading Group Session 1:
30 June 2020, 19:00 (EEST)
Of Animacy Reading Group x All Flesh is Grass: On Monstrous Sentience
Of Animacy Reading Group gathers online over the summer months in conjunction with Kim?’s current exhibition All Flesh is Grass. Thinking through the themes of the exhibition, Of Animacy presents a selection of texts enquiring into plant agency and sentience, interspecies communication and the complexities of framing nonhuman life through an anthropocentric lens. All texts have been selected in collaboration with Of Animacy convener Nella Aarne and All Flesh is Grass working group: Una Hamilton Helle, Eltons Kūns, Uma Breakdown, and Erik Martinson.
The first gathering enquires into the perceived alienness and unnerving quality of our green, earthly companions in the western post-Enlightenment fantasy of human mastery over nature. Literature and film scholar Dawn Keetley’s six theses on plant horror unpick the human anxiety over our inability to contain vegetal life and how this anxiety is captured in film by the figure of the monstrous plant threatening human existence. Author Roald Dahl’s short story, The Sound Machine, however, reveals the violence embedded to many human pursuits and finds horror in our failure to perceive the vibrancy and vulnerability of non- human life.
The gatherings seek to create a comfortable and generous environment for relaxed discussion, with an aim to recognise vital alliances for our daily life and political thought. Of Animacy is always open to all. Reading the selected text in advance is recommended but not necessary – excerpts will be read together to support open discussion.
To RSVP and access the readings, please email nella@nellaaarne.art. The online event link will be sent to all participants on the day of the gathering.
Key texts:
Dawn Keetley, ‘Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?’, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
Roald Dahl, ‘The Sound Machine’ (Penguin Books, 1996, originally published in The New Yorker, 1949)
Further reading:
Kier-La Janisse, ‘Murder Season: The Strange World of Vegetal Detecting’, byNWR, Vol. 5, (2019): https://www.bynwr.com/articles/murder-season
Teresa Castro, ‘The Mediated Plant’, e-flux Journal, No. 102 (September 2019): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/102/283819/the-mediated-plant/
Upcoming Sessions:
21 July 2020, 19:00 (EEST)
Session 2: On Embodied Language
Texts by: David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Monica Gagliano.
11 August 2020, 19:00 (EEST)
Session 3: On More-than-Human Sociality
Texts by: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Elvia Wilk, and Astrida Neimanis.
Of Animacy Reading Group has been convened by curator Nella Aarne since 2017. The gatherings focus on feminist writings on human and non-human agents in the material world, spanning philosophy and natural and human sciences.
Bios:
Kier-La Janisse (CA) is a film writer and programmer, founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver and was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012) and co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017).
Nella Aarne (FI) is a curator living and working in the UK. She is the Co-Director of Obsidian Coast with artist Sam Smith, and the convener of the Of Animacy Reading Group. Envisaging feminist and environmentally sustainable practices, her work considers ethical encounters, collaborative learning and redefined notions of productivity. She is invested in critical thought that calls for heightened sensitivity to our own socio-political and material entanglements with boundless subject positions, histories, living beings, molecular compositions, technological apparatuses and infrastructure. Nella has worked on projects for ICA, London; Arnolfini, Bristol; Glasgow International; Art Licks Weekend, London; and Science Museum, London. She earned her BA Honours in History of Art from the University of Leeds in 2012, completed the MFA Curating programme at Goldsmiths in 2015, and was the recipient of the Curatorial Junior Fellowship at Goldsmiths in 2015–16.
