Prayer for Burnt Forests
Julie Weitz
featuring CONDUIT by Lynn Kim
Screening 1 : Sunday, Aug 21 @ 8pm
Conduit (2022) Lynn Kim | 5:25m
Prayer for Burnt Forests (2021) Julie Weitz | 14:34m
Screening 2 : Sunday, Aug 28 @ 8pm
Conduit (2022) Lynn Kim | 5:25m
Prayer for Burnt Forests (2021) Julie Weitz | 14:34m
Prayer for Burnt Forests is a film and public art initiative by Julie Weitz that extends upon the ethical imperative of tikkun olam (to heal the world) by upholding the land’s right to rest and recuperation, after having suffered for humanity’s wrongdoings. In the film—the latest in Weitz’s My Golem series—a mythological golem traverses the recently-charred forests of Tongva land in Southern California, performing the prayer as a ritual dance. Weitz’s silent, clowning performance feels both tragic and comic, satirical and deeply sincere in its exhibition of care for the land it both haunts and heals.
Prayer for Burnt Forests (2021) | 1-channel HD video, 14:34m
Together with Rabbi Zach Fredman, Weitz created a prayer intended to be read and delivered in nature as a gesture of respect, restoration, and genesis. For her exhibition at stop-gap projects, Julie Weitz invited artists and activists brontë velez and L. Frank to contribute to a collaborative publication. She posed the question: when the wildfires burn out of control, how do we care for ourselves and the earth?
In response and collaboration with the artists, publisher-in-residence, Flatpack Publications (Connor Frew) designed and printed this riso printed publication.
This project was originally filmed on unceded Tongva land in Angeles National Forest. To support the rematriation of Tongva please consider a guest offering to the emergent Tongva Tah-rah’-hat Paxaavxa Conservancy.
Co-Directors, Julie Weitz and D.S. Chun
Director of Photography, Mustafa Rony Zeno
Music Production and Sound Design, Daniel Ori
Composer / Oud, Zach Fredman
Vocalist, Deborah Sacks Mintz
Costume Designer, Jill Spector
Performer, Julie Weitz
Prayer Co-Writers, Zach Fredman and Julie Weitz
Hebrew Translator, Yarden Stern
Co-commissioned by The Contemporary Jewish Museum, AJU’s Institute for Jewish Creativity and Asylum Arts
Julie Weitz is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose performance art practice responds to local surroundings with an attuned sensory awareness of ecological and historical contexts. Since 2017, Weitz has been focused on a multipart performance series that centers on a feminist embodiment of a mystical creature drawn from Yiddish folklore. That project, My Golem, reimagines the mythological golem as a sacred clown who guides humanity toward reparative ways of relating to one another and to the more-than-human world.
Weitz’s work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. Her first solo museum exhibition is currently on view at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. She is a 2020-21 Cultural Trailblazer of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and also a Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt. In the past, Weitz has received support from the California Center for Cultural Innovation, The Banff Centre, Asylum Arts, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Weitz earned her BFA at the University of Texas, Austin and MFA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She currently teaches in Los Angeles and regularly contributes to Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA).
CONDUIT (2022) Produced, directed, sound designed and animated by Lynn Kim, 05:25m
CONDUIT is a film that explores the overlaps and connections between the activity of running, Korean shamanism, and their shared use of the body as a tool and instrument. Korean shamanism is a practice that aims to achieve a state of communication between heaven and earth, with the shaman as the intermediary. It is a bodily demanding practice as it relies on the constant percussion of a drum and the use of breath and vocalizations in order to communicate (or expel) spirits. It is said that communication with the gods and spirits is achieved only at the height of cacophony, in which those who are present can focus on nothing but their bodies and the sheer noise and chaos of the instruments and voice of the shaman herself. CONDUIT asks what could happen if the heavy footfalls of a run, the rhythmic inhale/exhale patterns of breath, and the emptying of the mind while running begin to mirror the elements of a Korean shamanic ritual. With the runner then operating as the shaman, the moments of the run wherein they are airborne and wherein they touch the ground are moments of contact with heaven and earth. A simple run outside then becomes the means to explore, for a fleeting moment of time, alternative states of being. Created using a range of drawing, digital, and stop-motion animation techniques, the filmmaking process becomes a parallel ritual that likewise requires rhythm, repetition and bodily presence.
Lynn Kim is a Korean American filmmaker and educator who uses live-action and animation techniques to create short films that explore the social conditions and realities of the human body. She is particularly interested in how questions around gender, race, health and sexuality can be explored through metaphorical and abstract means, and her work is often centered in her own body and lived experiences.
Her films pull from the fields of biology, poetry, and anthropology to draw connections and metaphorical relationships that question how we navigate the world, with a focus in film as a form of social critique and reflection. Past examples of this research approach include a short film that examined shared sites of queerness between herself and the spotted hyena, a film essay about the color yellow as it pertained to racial identity and the corvina fish, and a multi-channel installation to convey a kinesthetic experience of living with systemic lupus.
She has had the fortune of exhibiting and competing in international festivals and shows including: The Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Margulies Collection, Rooftop Films and the Melbourne International Animation Festival. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Ohio State University. She currently lives in Columbia, MO where she is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Digital Storytelling department at the University of Missouri.