Artists' Television Access

This Month at ATA

Artists' Television Access
Weekly Newsletter

Coming Up This Month

Saturday, April 19, 2025, 8:00 pm, classic-editor

OC: HISTORIES OF RESISTANCE

MANNING’s PALESTINE REPORT + ARCHIVAL A FIDAI +
Inaugurating our 4-week History from Below series, here’s the West Coast premiere of a fabled piece of Palestinian cinema, introduced by long-time Mission ally Caitlin Manning. Kamal Aljafari‘s 2024 A Fidai is a multiple-award-winning response to the 1982 looting of of the Palestinian Film Archive in Lebanon by Israeli Defense Forces, in which the maker has ingeniously inserted new material into gaps in the filmstrip itself! He digitally re-positions new figures and grounds as “Counter-Archive“ techniques, towards re-purposing what’s left to restore a people’s memory. In our opening section, Caitin shares 5 contemporary shorts made in Gaza and the West Bank, plus introduces a brisk Report Back from her recent junket to Ramallah, Hebron, and other Wesr Bank locales. $10

Friday, April 25, 2025, 7:00 pm, $10, classic-editor

Feminina Sagrada-Scared Feminine

A Manifestation of the divine feminine, La Mujer Indígena.  Experimental films by radical filmmakers Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, from Mexico, curated by Chuli 1312. This program is invitation into the spirit realms of the sacred and the dead • eroded and blood red • flows like water • a trance • the scattered body parts of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui •  a sacrifice to the ancestors • an audiovisual offering • a place of protection, mysticism and rebirth.

door 6:30, screening 7 PM

Saturday, April 26, 2025, 8:00 pm, classic-editor

OC: LOST NATIONAL FILM TREASURE

BRECKE IN PERSON: SOMALIA IN THE PICTURE
Our own (Bernal Heights) international-doc star-shooter is just in from Rwanda to debut his long-in-the-making Somalia masterpiece, the utterly epic quest for the lost film culture of that troubled country. Brecke teams up with the Somali director of the most essential film account of the Dervish liberation story at the core of its memory-sourced. Their film-historical interviews generate multiple nationalistic themes riding a progressively revelatory narrative. Brecke checks in on the current Somali nationals in the Diaspora, all the while—from Mogadishu!–witnessing the production, the destruction, and the determined efforts to finally unearth the crown jewel of 90 years of obscured and obliterated cinema. $14

Monday, April 28, 2025, 7:30 pm, $10, classic-editor

Rewards Program

An improvisational music project featuring Miles Lassi, Zekarias Thompson, and Skyway Man set to expanded cinema 16mm and 35mm slide projections by Ellie Vanderlip.
A three-projector celluloid meditation live-scored by improvisational trio Rewards Program, on the power of the seed and birth and death in the atomic age.
MILES LASSI is an interdisciplinary artist based out of Oakland, CA. As a musician, he has performed in over 150 cities throughout North America, Europe and Asia with many
different ensembles ranging from the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to national broadway tours like Ain’t Too Proud, Dirty Dancing, and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Miles is dedicated to creating new media and has done so at the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theater, deYoung Museum, Joyce Theater, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, A.C.T., SXSW and Snap Studios/KQED.
SKYWAY MAN is the alias of keyboardist, songwriter, and producer James Wallace. Based in Oakland via Richmond, VA, and Nashville, TN, he has released seven albums and composed music for Film/TV, including Joe Pera Talks With You (HBO). Over the past 15 years, he has toured extensively across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, performing at festivals like Bonnaroo, Pickathon, SXSW, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and Wilco’s Solid Sound. He has collaborated with Abigail Washburn, Langhorne Slim, Erin Rae, and Maya Hawke, among others. Brittany Howard once named his band a favorite local act in Rolling Stone, and his work has been featured in NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and Stereogum. He’s produced 20 full-length albums for other artists, including Bay Area musicians Mikayla McVey, Milk for the Angry, and Pancho Morris. Over the past few years he’s developed a practice of live instrumental film scoring using keyboards and sequencers.
ZEKARIAS MUSELE THOMPSON (b. 1983, they/them/their) is an artist based in Oakland, CA, and Reykjavik, IS often working in sonic composition, mark-making, photography, collaborative group practice & performance, and writing. Their practice is concerned with humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures—and how we bring them into material form. Zekarias has presented solo exhibitions and projects at the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Lab, Gray Area, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. Zekarias is a co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively owned and organized arts institution with the mission of building institutional stability and equity for underrepresented creative practices, ideas, and people. They were part of the Emerging Artist Program at the MoAD for 2024, and are currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley.
ELLIE VANDERLIP is a San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker, performer, and educator. She received her MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 2022. She is a co-director at Oakland’s Shapeshifters Cinema, on the board of directors at San Francisco’s Cinematheque, and maintains a studio at Artists’ Television Access. She has hosted filmmaking workshops with the Exploratorium, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the University of San Francisco, and lectures at St. Mary’s College and San Francisco State University. Her primary focuses are found footage experimental documentary, material cinema, and expanded cinema performance. Her work has screened nationally and internationally, including at San Francisco DocFest and Belgrade’s Kinoscope Festival, and has upcoming writings about alternative archives in Found Footage Magazine.

Window Installations

Wednesday, April 30, 2025, 2:21 pm, classic-editor

Caroline McManus: SUPERFETATION

ATA Window Gallery presents: SUPERFETATION by Caroline McManus
SUPERFETATION is a mixed media installation composed of the following elements:

WATER
FOUND OBJECT
Ikea pod chair.
AUTONOMOUS ROBOT:
Robotic goldfish.
TRASH, RESIN
GLAD ForceFlex trash bags cast in resin and plastic fish transport bag.
NETWORKED IMAGES ON TILE:
Stills from the 1988 film, “Baby M”.

This film is based on a controversial case wherein a gestational laborer, Mary Beth Whitehead, was denied parenthood rights and portrayed as a hysterical, trashy woman in the media. In her bold feminist performance, Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads The Strange Case of Baby $/M, Martha Rosler counters this narrative, which this work builds off of.

Superfetation is a second conception during pregnancy, which causes the womb-bearer to carry two, differently-aged embryos, growing parallel to one another. In a spectacular real-life case in the United States, a hired surrogate laborer, carrying what she thought were twins, learned upon giving birth that this was not the case at all. In fact, one child, which she thought had been an implanted embryo, was actually her own child, conceived with her partner. She immediately recognized the child as hers, yet she was required to relinquish both children: the contract she signed meant that her child was no longer her “property”.

As the surrogacy industry stands, both the working bodies and the born bodies become property. In the United States, the nuclear family structure produces, reproduces and protects property. Currently, the demand for surrogacy services among the global middle class is exploding at the same time that the nuclear family structure absorbs all demands that would otherwise be provided by community-centered care, and/or a functional welfare state.

This work utilizes the symbol and phenomenon of superfetation to explore themes related to the acceleration of consumption culture, private property, and bodies-as-property in a near-dystopian future accelerated by climate change.

About Artists' Television Access

Artists' Television Access is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) artist-run screening venue and gallery located in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District. ATA is supported in part by Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, The Christensen Fund, individuals members, donors and volunteers.

CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA: Join ATA as a member and receive exciting gifts, including the 2008 DVD compilation, T-shirts, and free admission to screenings and more! Artists on the 2008 DVD compilation include: Yin-Ju Chen, Mike Rollo, Marthaxiv, Sam Manera, Wago Kreider, Federico Campanale, Paul Clipson and Carl Diehl. http://www.atasite.org/membership/

How to Reach Us:
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street (at 21st)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 824-3890
ata@atasite.org

Gallery is open before and after screenings for viewing.
Screenings start at 8pm unless otherwise noted.

Directions: Take Bart to 24th Street Mission. Walk 1 block east to Valencia and 3 blocks north. ATA is located between 21st and 20th Streets.