April 23, 2026 | 6pm | at Tacoma Art Museum
Evidence of the Evidence (78 min, 1999-2024)
These five works of cinema examine history as something constructed, mediated, and often fragmented through memory, archives, and storytelling. From the 1971 Attica prison uprising (Evidence of the Evidence) and Puerto Rican anti-colonial resistance movement (Oneiromancer) to personal family histories (Mum’s Cards and File No. 2304), and the Lebanese civil wars (The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs), these works investigate how narratives are shaped by both institutional power and subjective experience. Together, they probe the gaps, silences, and distortions embedded in official records, state documents, and personal artifacts, foregrounding the tension between lived experience and its documentation.
With Alex Johnston (Evidence of the Evidence) in attendance.
Evidence of the Evidence
(2018, US, 21 min, digital file) Alex Johnston
The 1971 Attica prison uprising is a signature moment of radical resistance for the American Civil Rights movement. The bloody retaking of the prison however, is an open wound. Utilizing rarely seen video recordings, Evidence of the Evidence explores this tortured history. It offers a visceral account of the events at Attica, and chronicles the mediation and narrativization of these events. In so doing, it reflects on the role that moving images play in the production of history and memory, its creation and its destruction.
Oneiromancer
(2017, US, 26 min, digital file) Beatriz Santiago Munoz
Oneiromancer is the first of a series of works on the sensorial unconscious of the Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement. It centers on the figures, places and leftover materials of the members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, a clandestine group, who were sentenced to near-lifetime prison terms for seditious conspiracy, a political crime.
Mum’s Cards
(2018, UK, 9 min, 16mm to digital file) Luke Fowler
My mother is a Sociologist – she came to Glasgow from the south of England in the 60’s to work within the Politics Department of Glasgow University- after a few years the Sociologists broke away and formed their own department, where she taught until she retired. Although the university advocated and furnished her with her own personal computer – she still used index cards to make notes on the books and articles that she read. Now that she no longer has an office her house is filled with shoeboxes and filing cabinets containing these cards. My mother was absent on the day that I shot this film; the interview and sounds were recorded at a later date. – Luke Fowler
File No. 2304
(2024, US, 5 min, digital file) A.S.M. Kobayashi
Canada forcibly incarcerated and dispossessed thousands of Canadian citizens of Japanese heritage, relocating them to internment camps, or in the case of the Kobayashi family, a sugar beet work farm in the Canadian Prairies. After accessing the 119 page custodial file of her great-grandfather in the National Archives of Canada, Kobayashi discovered details about her family history and their life before their internment that were previously unknown. File No. 2304 is a chapter of her interdisciplinary work, Electric Neon Clock, which explores the government’s custodial file about her family consisting of court transcripts, inventories and forms that reveal hidden narratives and family history.
The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs
(1999, Lebanon / United States, 16 min, digital file)
Walid Raad
This piece investigates the possibilities and limits of writing a history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-1991). The videos offer accounts of the fantastic situations that beset a number of individuals, though they do not document what happened. Rather, they explore what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, what can appear as rational, sayable, and thinkable about the wars.
Elements: Material and Process in the Moving Image is a six-part film series, presenting twenty-five works from contemporary artists, and conceived in dialogue with the exhibition HAUNTED.
Curated by David Dinnell and Jay Kuehner
Focusing on matter that spans both natural and artificial realms – and its transformation through manual, mechanical, and organic processes – the works in this series undertake an accounting of the lived world. Taken in context with the TAM exhibition HAUNTED, these selected works collectively consider how the experiential is framed through empirical and intuitive means, with moving images acting as witness, catalyst, surrogate, and archive. Manifest in extractive and generative forms, destructive and productive acts, durable to ephemeral ends, the processual – as cinematic event – reveals latent histories in granular form but of ever-increasing consequence. Featuring 25 works that scale from deeply personal to broadly historical, from geologic to anthropogenic; fusing the merely observational to the sheerly operational image.