THE 10 EXHIBITIONS TO SEE IN DECEMBER 2024
CARMEN AMENGUAL: A NON-COINCIDENTAL MIRROR

ARTREVIEW
DECEMBER 2, 2024

“In December 1973, film directors from various countries including Argentina, Cuba, Mauritania and Senegal travelled to Algiers for the First Third World Filmmakers Meeting, to discuss strategies for countering the ideological and economic pressures of neocolonialism in cinema. The Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Carmen Amengual enters this episode in time via the letters and photographs of her late mother, an Argentinian architect who’d had a hand in organising the Algiers assembly. … At a certain point in the film, the camera acts as an interloper, recording the stairs of a residential building through what appears to be a hole in a nearby wall, producing an image that brims with the longing and urgency of a researcher one generation removed from the action, who must re-perform and reconstitute a gaze using the few but precious tools she has inherited.”

—Jenny Wu