Programmed by Kathy High, 72 min

Artists Ximena Cuevas and Ricardo Nicolayevsky helped shape a generation of film and video makers in Mexico City. Ximena and Ricardo created their own cinematic styles, pushing cultural critique and video experimentation while embracing queer approaches to their medium. Both artists had been around the art world all their lives. Their influences were particularly poignant in the 1990s, displaying courage and vulnerability and imagining new ways to be in the world. Ximena’s 1990s original works were playful and incisive treatments of reality television, obsession with fame and wealth, exploitation, dreams, and tragedies that broke the boundaries of video art, alternative storytelling, and imagined futures. Ricardo rediscovered films he had shot in New York City in the early 1980s and released them in the 1990s. These films, with in-camera film experimentation throughout, were beautiful homages to his friends, which also captured an era of queer youth, absurd beauty, and idealism just prior to the AIDS epidemic.

Co-sponsored by the Art Department