Screening
Two Films by Moyra Davey
7/15/2021, 8:15PM
Join us for a screening and discussion of Moyra Davey’s films Les Goddesses (2011) and Hemlock Forest (2016). Hemlock Forest begins as Davey searches for a definitive filmic subject while reflecting on the value of a life lived versus a life recorded. At the same time, she examines her own artistic strategies alongside the work of the influential Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. During the making of Hemlock Forest, Akerman took her own life. The filmmaker’s unexpected death soon engulfed Davey’s awareness, prompting a broader exploration of Akerman’s and her own biographies, amidst more universal themes of compulsion, artistic production, life and its passing.
Largely shot in her New York home, Les Goddesses collapses together the lives and personalities of Davey and her five sisters, with those of the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th century feminist writer and activist whose Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark was first published in 1796. Davey’s film shows the artist pacing her apartment, reading aloud from notes she has written and then recorded. It’s a remarkably intimate, at times awkward performance, wherein the slight but profound gap between the act of writing and then of speaking generates a sense of distance and proximity, intimacy and occlusion.
This program was made possible through funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
About the Filmmaker
Moyra Davey is a New York-based artist whose work comprises the fields of photography, film and writing. She is the author of Index Cards, Burn the Diaries, The Problem of Reading, and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. The Shabbiness of Beauty, a book of photographs by Peter Hujar and Davey, with a text by Eileen Myles, was recently published by Mack Books, London. Davey’s work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Tate Modern in London. She is a 2020 recipient of the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
