Stand in the Stream is directed by Stanya Kahn. Due to unforeseen circumstances, Director Stanya Kahn will no longer be present for this screening. Fast-paced, personal, and urgent, Stand in the Stream weaves together the narrative of Kahn’s activist mother’s physical and mental deterioration and death, the birth of Kahn’s son, and Kahn’s own role as a mother and child— all amidst the changing political landscape. The narrative lines shift from macro to micro in one breath, marrying intimate family-movie footage with live streams from Tahrir Square, protests at Standing Rock, and Trump’s inauguration. Shot on multiple cameras and formats, the film itself is a document of the ever-changing digital medium.
Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video with a practice that includes drawing, sound, writing, performance and sculpture/installation. Humor, pathos and the uncanny emerge as central modes in a hybrid media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse. In a long-term investigation of how rhetoric gains and loses power, Kahn’s projects often situate language in the foreground of works that are dialectically driven by the demands of the body. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at the New Museum/NY, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Marlborough Chelsea/NY, Weiss Berlin, The Pit/LA, Cornerhouse/Manchester, UK. Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She has collaborated with Harry Dodge, Ishmael Houston-Jones and the performance company CORE. Select group exhibitions include the Gwanju Biennial (2018), Hammer Museum, the New Museum, MOCA/SD, Fernley Astrup/Norway, The California Biennial (2010). Her solo works are in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of art among others. Her collaborative work with Harry Dodge has shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery/NY, the Whitney Biennial (08), Sundance Film Festival, MOCA/LA, MoMA/NY, ZKM/Karlsrüh, among othersand is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art/NY and the Goetz collection. She was a contributing writer and actor in feature film By Hook or By Crook. Her writings and drawings appear in multiple publications including Die Laughing (2nd Cannons), Moving Image (MIT Press), It’s Cool, I’m Good (Cornerhouse), and Abstract Video (UC Press).
This event is part of the film series, “Women Filmmakers at the Intersection of Documentary, Video Art, and Avant Garde,” curated by Joshua Malitsky and Masha Vlasova. This series is sponsored by the Center for Documentary Research and Practice; the School of Art, Architecture + Design; and IU Cinema. This partnership is supported through IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program and the College Arts and Humanities Institute.