Screening | Experimental Films by Rei Hayama

Jan 26, 2019 | 5 – 6PM
Total runtime of screening – 68 min

Their Bird, 2010 – 2012, 13 min
Inaudible Footsteps, 2015, 4 min
The Focus, 2013, 25 min
Still Life Composition (An Accompaniment For Life), 2015, 22 min
On The Collinear and Reflected On The Water, 2018, 4 min

Empty Gallery is pleased to present a screening of five experimental films by Rei Hayama, in conjunction with the closing of our exhibitions with the closing of our exhibitions Rei Hayama: The Pearl of Tailorbird and Takashi Makino: Memento Stella.

Working between text, sound, and moving-image, Hayama crafts profoundly beautiful short films whose obliquely mythopoetic narratives explore what might best be termed “ecological anomie”. Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as the Lumière brothers, medieval Japanese poetry, and proto-scientific treatises by Goethe and Aristotle, Hayama’s works probe the essential loneliness experienced by a human-kind which has been estranged from the unity of nature by our modern systems of perception and knowledge production. While many experimental filmmakers operating in a romantic mode have taken nature as a subject – often seeking to spectacularize her optical presence through the creation of “transcendent” imagery – Hayama’s films are characterized by an uncommon sense of aesthetic restraint, a conscious preservation of critical distance in the face of nature’s inscrutability and our own primordial entanglement within it.