“I spoke to Suparak about […] how sports and the arts are not mutually exclusive sources of inquiry and criticism of our political and cultural spheres.”
Tag: 2024
The Game is Not the Thing film & performance series
Spanning pre-cinema to post-internet, this six-part screening & performance series at the Walker Art Center challenges the idea that the worlds of sports and art are mutually exclusive.
Jordan Wept
A video spotlighting the range and utility of the long-running Crying Jordan meme, which re-immortalizes one of the 20th century’s most successful athletes into an avatar of failure; an Everyman for disappointment, angst, and sorrow; a tool for rapid responses to live events; and a demonstration of the increased power of (anonymous, decentralized) fan culture.
Walker Magazine: “No Time for Winners”
“The sports film genre—as it has come to be defined through its codes, scholarship, production and screening contexts, and broadcast platforms—is dominated by two typologies: fictive sports films, which often reinforce dominant attitudes and social and cultural stereotypes while distorting or whitewashing history for storytelling purposes; and commercial documentaries, which typically focus on exceptional players, coaches, or teams.”
White Robot Tears (Cry Me An Ocean)
“A collage of Caucasian actors in roles as emotionally complex robots, AIs and cyborgs. [The installation] questions who is granted the privilege of humanity and emotional depth in these techno-futuristic landscapes.”
Tropical Cats
“A sly, sun-soaked detour into cat video territory, refracted through postcolonial critique and pop collage. This winking essay film uses the feline internet genre to unpack tropical aesthetics, exoticism, and identity politics, purring with layered audio, meme logic, and cultural dissection. As playful as it is pointed.”
Tropical Fruit in European Still Lifes
What may be broadly viewed as benign paintings from dusty art history books point to still-reverberating and repeating histories of colonialism, trade, and sources of European and American wealth through extraction.
Essay in The Unruly Archive
Stephanie Syjuco invited nine artists to contribute short essays about their own work with archives to the monograph of her research-based practice, including Pio Abad, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Wendy Red Star, LJ Roberts, Astria Suparak, and Carmen Winant.
Carnegie Museum of Art film series
As the guest curator for the Film Series, Suparak crafted 1 year of programs around key ideas present in both the museum collection and her own practice, including science fiction and fantasy, architecture, sports, media criticism, diaspora and inheritance.
Art and Knowledge After 1900 includes Asian Futures
“This ground-breaking new history of modern art explores the relationship between art and knowledge from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.”
White Robot Tears
“Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.”
Finite Horizon
An amalgamated skyline of Asian futures imagined by white filmmakers. Sourced from sci-fi movies and television shows that depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world overtly marked with elements of East, Southeast, and South Asian architecture.
Asian futures, without Asians multimedia performance
This live cinema work is illustrated with images and clips from futuristic films and TV shows. Accompanied by a live musical soundtrack, Suparak delivers anecdotes, trivia, and documents from the histories of art, architecture, fashion, film, religion, and science.
Helmet to Helmet
A collage of the Philippine salakót; how it was worn by Filipinos and Spaniards in the occupying Spanish army; then adapted into the pith helmet, since deployed by every white colonial power.
ASIANS HAVE BEEN HERE LONGER THAN COWBOYS
Billboard created for For Freedoms by Stop DiscriminAsian.
Virtually Asian
A short video essay that looks at how white science fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.
Asian Futures series
Series of projects, performances, and texts on how white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of significant Asian people. A visual analysis of 60 years of mainstream science-fiction cinema.
Astria Suparak 