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Film screening: Mary Helena Clark, Peng Zuqiang, and Ana Vaz

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sep 24

Wed, Sep 24 2025, 6PM - 8PM

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Minnesota Street Project Foundation | 1201 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, 94107 View map

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Organized by

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

wattis@cca.edu

Event description

Drawing inspiration from the exhibition Viaje a la luna, this program explores the porous boundaries between memory, perception, and representation, in the films of Mary Helena Clark, Peng Zuqiang, and Ana Vaz. Through layered images, disembodied voices, and poetic fragments, their works investigate how cinema can become a space for sensing what resists articulation—where histories echo, identities blur, and meaning flickers at the edge of perception.

In Mary Helena Clark’s The Glass Note (9 mins), a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema's inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the work reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image.

The Cyan Garden (8:05 mins) by Peng Zuqiang reflects on the difficulty of giving form to a past that resists memory. Filmed partly on discontinued military-grade 16mm stock, it moves between the ruins of an underground communist radio station and an Airbnb apartment called “The Lover.” The station, once home to the exiled Voice of the Malayan Revolution, now sits on a site soon to become a resort. Through ghostly images and drifting pop songs, the film traces the blurred lines between revolution, romance, and forgetting.

In 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (31 mins), named after the poem by Wallace Stevens, Ana Vaz presents a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Developed through a year-long collaboration with high school students as part of the City-State commission Unschool, the film becomes a kaleidoscope of shared questions and reflections. “The film is a song you can see,” wrote one student—a fitting description of a work where the camera becomes a tool for sensing, drawing, and dreaming.

This screening is co-presented with Minnesota Street Project Foundation.

Entry details

Taking Place at & in collaboration with the Minnesota Street Project Foundation