Sweet Land Screenings
North View Gallery
SWEET LAND SCREENINGS
Thursday, May 23, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
PCC Sylvania campus
The Little Theatre
(on the outside of the CT building across from the Performing Arts Center)
Wednesday, May 29, 1:00-3:00 p.m.
PCC Southeast campus
Scott 207
This coming May the North View Gallery is pleased to host two screenings of Sweet Land, a film of the experimental opera by The Industry, which was first performed on the lands inhabited and cared for by the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples in what is now called the Los Angeles State Historic Park. The first performances took place in February of 2020, before the pandemic halted in-person events.
Sweet Land is a grotesque historical pageant that disrupts the dominant narrative of American identity. It uses the first Thanksgiving to expose the erasures of history and how those erasures support continued settler colonial violence.
Sweet Land is the result of a highly collaborative and multi-perspectival approach. Composer Du Yun is a Chinese immigrant whose recent work originates from what she states is “a lack of understanding and empathy around immigration”. Composer Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st-century Indigeneity. He co-directs Sweet Land with Yuval Sharon, the Founder and Artistic Director of The Industry and a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.
The Sweet Land screenings are part of the Refractions screening series from the North View Gallery, made possible through a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Refractions features artists who use video, animation, and performance to refract or bend narrative directions by exposing the complicated realities of cultural myths, colonization, protracted international wars, migration, and the implications of past violence on potential futures.
Graphic design by Matt Foster.
