Screening of Pasture
With Asa Lipman Mendelsohn and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy
Still from Pasture.
About the event
This screening will take place in person, at Wendy's Subway.
Vaccination and masks are required.
RSVP required. To RSVP, please email programs@wendyssubway.com
Pasture is a film-in-edit addressing a grassroots movement that resisted private military development near the US-Mexico border in Southern California, and a trans New Yorker who arrives in pursuit of an unlikely coalition. This viewing will be accompanied by a discussion with the filmmaker, Asa Lipman Mendelsohn, joined by Sindhu Thirumalaisamy. The discussion will invite responses to the film, and extend an ongoing dialogue about the political possibilities of personal essay filmmaking (see, for instance, Sindhu and Asa’s conversation in Public Parking). Pandemic-related circumstances made it difficult to work on the film for the past year and a half. As Asa returns to it now with the political and emotional knowledge of the intervening time, he is grateful for this opportunity to share ideas and questions.
Pasture is in English with closed captions.
Run-time approximately 30 minutes, followed by a break and discussion.
About the participants
Asa Lipman Mendelsohn is an artist, writer, and educator motivated by transfeminist politics and the possibility to co-create encounters in which close listening can be transformative. Asa has performed and exhibited in homes, on the phone and radio, and at visual art and performance venues including Kunsthalle Wien, Links Hall, Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien, The Blanton Museum of Art, and Anthology Film Archive. He has written librettos for Ubundu and Aphasia (dir. Jelena Jureša) and essays published in Social Text, Sounding Out!, Momus, The Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. He has taught and facilitated performances with students and workers in schools, museums, church basements, malls, airports and online — most recently at the University of California, San Diego as a lecturer in critical gender studies. He is currently beginning to work with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Parole Preparation Project in New York.
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy is an artist, filmmaker, and sound designer whose work centres (un)common spaces and the possibilities for speech and action with/in them. Sindhu has worked in relation to hospitals, parks, streets, kitchens, temples, mosques, and lakes—sites that hold possibilities for collective resistance and care amidst hyperdevelopment and the enclosure of shared resources. Her debut film, The Lake and The Lake, won the Best Documentary Award at the 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival and has screened at festivals, independent media spaces, and educational institutions. Sindhu is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Video/Film, and a 2020–22 Core fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Asa and Sindhu have been working together since 2017.