Shelly Silver: Touch

Berlin Premiere, Screening and Talk

silent green is delighted to invite you to the Berlin premiere of Touch – an evening with our current Artist in Residence Shelly Silver:

With Touch, Silver focuses on the act - particular, yet open-ended - that entrances her protagonist: an act that we, the audience, share with him. This is the act of watching. Looking. Seeing. Recognizing. What does it mean to look, to watch, to photograph, to film? What does it mean to this man, who left his neighborhood because there was no place for him there, and returns, to actively construct a supportable history, family and home. And how does this watching and filming reverberate in Silver’s current context, Berlin, Germany? We look forward to discussing this with you.

Touch | 2013 | 63’
A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a cataloguer and recorder, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images - his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we look at them and share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse. Touch is an essay narrated from one man's point of view. But it is also fiction, for this man is a made-up person, an amalgam of research, interviews, off-the-record comments, secrets, improbabilities, and free-floating desires. This man, who never tells us his name, returns as both insider and outsider to a neighborhood from which he escaped, as a teenager, as fast as he could.

Shelly Silver is a New York based artist working with the still and moving image. Her work explores contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and – increasingly in recent years – the watcher and the watched. Silver is Associate Professor and Director of the Moving Image, Visual Arts Program, Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Her films have been featured and awarded at numerous international filmfestivals such as Dok.Leipzig, the Berlinale as well as the London, Singapore, New York and Moscow film festivals.

The silent green Film Feld Forschung Residency program is supported by the Goethe-Institut.

Entrance free