‘What Happened: Luis Arnias, Simon Liu, and Zhou Tao’ Exhibition

Light Work’s Urban Video Project presents What Happened, a three-person exhibition featuring the work of filmmakers Luis Arnias, Simon Liu, and Zhou Tao. The installation will be on view from February 4 thru March 4, 2021, at UVP’s outdoor projection site on the north facade of the Everson Museum of Art at 401 Harrison Street, Thursday through Saturday, from dusk until 11pm. What Happened takes us on a tour of ambiguous scenes where we find ourselves disoriented, unsure where and when we are, whether we find ourselves before, after, or during an indeterminate event. These works bear the unmistakable trace of the volatile forces shaping our current moment: protest, pandemic, state brutality, racialized violence, and ecological disaster. But this isn’t the news. As in life, these forces confront us in mostly oblique ways, as a nagging anxiety attaching to fragments torn from context and transforming them into a thousand strange and fascinating portents: a lost face mask in the gutter, an uprooted tree, an endlessly spinning loading icon, a cheerful pop song’s hollow echo, a flash that may or may not be fireworks.

Are these terrains mundane or extraordinary? Fact or fiction? Zones of autonomy or oppression? Recovery or impending disaster? Did it already happen? Will it happen soon? Is it happening now?
The resulting show is a meditation on living through “interesting” times.

In conjunction with the exhibition, UVP will host a FREE live-streamed screening of the What Happened program with additional works, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers on Thursday, March 4, at 6:30pm. The link will go live on UVP’s website Saturday, March 4, at 6:30 pm EST.

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