iNew Museum · Bowery, Lower East Side
Screens Series: Umi Ishihara
The US institutional debut of London- and Tokyo-based artist Umi Ishihara, bringing together three recent films exploring precarity and collective life through personal memory and social realities.
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In Thundergod, a mountain village in Japan is struck by lightning so often that it has a secret underground club, and the only people invited to dance there are those who survived a strike. Crabs keep turning up too. Plenty of Lower East Side clubs run a strict door; this one asks if you've been hit by lightning.
It is one of three films in Ishihara's first US museum show, which brings back the New Museum's Screens Series. You move from a small Baptist church in Kitakyushu, where people who came through crime, homelessness and abuse stage a Passion Play in Gravity and Radiance, to Nocturnal Melody, 24 minutes with two Tokyo dancers backstage and on stage at a Shibuya gentleman's club.
Real congregants and dancers share the screen with fiction and animated animals, so expect neither straight documentary nor drama. Entry comes with general admission: $28 for adults, free for 18 and under, and pay what you wish on Thursdays from 7 to 9pm.
Look for
Thundergod's lightning club
Look for the underground club in an imaginary Japanese mountain village where only lightning-strike survivors perform, and the crabs the villagers keep running into.
The Passion Play in Gravity and Radiance
Members of a small Kitakyushu church, many with pasts of crime, homelessness or depression, act out the Passion in simple costumes and talk about how their lives changed.
Eri and Catalina in Nocturnal Melody
Two Tokyo dancers are filmed in dressing rooms and on stage at Madam Woo's club in Shibuya, partly in night vision, telling stories of childhood, dreams and politics.
Ishihara's night animals
In Nocturnal Melody's dream sequences, her stylised nocturnal animals roam Tokyo's streets at night, licking and clambering over each other.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Locals Who've Seen It All
Skip if
You want straight documentary: Ishihara mixes real people with fiction, night vision and animated animals.
Free in the same building
Plan a visit to New MuseumAlso at New Museum
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Image credits
5
- Screens Series: Umi IshiharaCourtesy the artist
- Anna Maria Maiolino. ANNA—And the Infinite LineCourtesy of Hauser & Wirth
- Common SenseCourtesy of Brooklyn Museum
- Luminous ColorCourtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum
- New MuseumMusikAnimal, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0