Storytellers' Institute 2016
Fellows' Exhibit at Spring Street Gallery
Thursday, June 16–Wednesday, June 29
From June 16 to 29, the Spring Street Gallery in Saratoga Springs hosts an MDOCS exhibition
showcasing the work of the 2016 institute fellows as well as documentary work by affiliated
faculty and MDOCS/Storytellers' institute students.
Institute Fellows Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Amanda Dawn Christie, Jake Nussbaum and Courtney Reid-Eaton present a glimpse of their practice in exhibition and artist talks, pop-up exhibits and screenings.
Additional work on display by affiliated faculty Sarah Sweeney (art) and Adam Tinkle (MDOCS/media and film studies); 2015 institute scholars Jackson Bryant '16, Nat Cabrera '17, Wilson Espinal '17, Ele MartΓnez '18 and Evian Pan '17; 2016 institute scholar Emily Rizzo '18; and Lisa Fierstein '16, Lisa Moran '17 and Mirella Nappi '16.
Spring Street Gallery is open weekdays 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and by appointment.
Curated by Nicky Tavares, Mellon fellow; installation by Belinda ColΓ³n. The Spring Street Gallery executive director is Maureen Sager.
Schedule of Events
Thursday, June 16: Opening reception, 6–9 p.m.
7–7:30 p.m.: Courtney Reid-Eaton artist talk and Q&A
8–8:30 p.m.: Jake Nussbaum artist talk and Q&A
Tuesday, June 21, 7–9 p.m., screening Inheritance 7–9 p.m.
Directly followed by a Q&A with Director Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz
Inheritance (2012, 26 minutes) poetically explores the influence of political realities on lived, daily experience. In this personal documentary film, Iranian-born filmmaker Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz intimately explores the contemporaneous events of the Islamic revolution and divorce that uprooted her family and embroiled them in the complicated process of diasporic identity formation in the U.S. Using her mother’s home as a metaphor for diasporic space, the filmmaker excavates the detritus that settled around the family as they traversed the uneven terrains of revolution, divorce, and eventually, self-imposed exile.
This story unfolds through a collage of images, forms, voices and eras. Archival images of the polling stations in which millions of Iranians voted for an Islamic republic pipe in through a television watched by the filmmaker’s family in the U.S. 30 years later. Questions and photos documenting the filmmaker’s absent father are integrated into a poetic voiceover written and spoken by the filmmaker, looking back from the contemporary moment, aiming to recover a lost history, seeking to look forward.
Learn more about the film and watch the trailer at
Thursday, June 23, 7–9:30 p.m.: Exclusive test screening of Spectres of Shortwave
Directly followed by a Q&A with Director Amanda Dawn Christie
Spectres of Shortwave is an experimental documentary film about the RCI shortwave radio towers in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. Images in the film were captured on 35mm film accompanied by personal stories told by people who lived near the towers. For more than 67 years, the Radio Canada International (RCI) shortwave site broadcast all over the world. In 2012, budget cuts necessitated the decommissioning of this site.
This film is part of a greater project Amanda has been working on since 2008 called Requiem for Radio. This body of work is multidisciplinary using audio, video, interactive programming, theremins, sculpture, text and performance to pay homage to the recently demolished Radio Canada International shortwave transmission site. All of her projects surrounding the RCI radio towers have been a mix of fact and fiction, as she places rural mythology alongside historical fact without differentiating between the two.
Learn more about the film and watch preview clips at