Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims
Film Information
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is a film and research project by artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Since 2016, the duo collaborates on a series of films, that each follow a classical element (water, earth, wind, fire) to help us reimagine the world speculatively and reparatively. Their ‘elemental cinema’ merges poetics and critical theory, to propose a poignant and emotional take on the ethical-political challenges of the global present, through human and non-human perspectives. Part documentary and part personal essay, their films transform our ways of seeing, knowing and being. The third film in their series, Ancestral clouds Ancestral claims follows the wind and what it carries -from dust to clouds, ideas, stories and voices- as a guide and an analytical framework.
Filmed in Chile, in the Atacama desert it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past present and future, in this site.
Taking us on a visual journey through the ALMA large array facility, an international astronomical observatory, and the lithium mines of the Atacama, the film shows how material trajectories are deeply entwined with the pursuit of foundational ideas from the enlightenment, their mutation into aspects of modern neoliberal authoritarianism and their dissemination.
Timeless, plural, and untamable, the wind in virtue of the memories, particles, and ancestral claims it carries, acts as a prism that reveals that which is hidden in plain sight: the pillars of Western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism.
Co-produced by Kunsthalle Wien.
Participants
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, New York University. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Unpayable Debt (2022), Dívida Impagável (2019), and Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text; Theory, Culture & Society; philoSOPHIA; Griffith Law Review; Theory & Event and The Black Scholar, among others. Her artworks include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018) and Soot Breath /Corpus Infinitum (2020), with Arjuna Neuman and Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri. She has taught at UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Queen Mary-University of London and visited Birkbeck-University of London, University of São Paulo, Université de Paris VIII and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art and a faculty at the European Graduate School.
Arjuna Neuman is an artist and writer. He has presented solo mid-career surveys at MACBA in Barcelona, Munch Museum in Oslo, and Belkin Gallery in Vancouver and forthcoming at Kunsthalle Bern. He has presented solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Vienna; CCA Glasgow; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT, Portugal amongst many others. He has participated in the Berlin Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Bergen Assembly, the 56th Venice Biennial, Qalandia Biennial, Ural Industrial Biennial, Hacer Noche in Mexico and many other large group exhibitions. He has been included in film festivals such as Berlinale, Images Festival, Docsliboa, Third Horizon. In 2024 he won the Artist Moving Image prize at Les Rencontre International Festival; in 2024 he was a fellow at Villa Aurora and in 2022 a fellow at the Flaherty Seminar. His work is kept in the Belkin Collection, Kunsthalle Bern Collectors Circle; IAC Lyon and Platform UK. He has a forthcoming monograph published with Archive Books. As a writer, he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux. He is the founder of Archive of Belonging, a platform and resource list supporting migrants and refugees.
He was a fellow at Villa Aurora in 2024.
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator born in New York and based in Los Angeles. Their novel Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023) uses speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. Current curatorial projects include The Sky Is Always Falling: HIV/AIDS Activists Unleashing Power in Los Angeles Then and Now for the 2025 ONE Institute Circa Queer Histories Festival. They are a consulting curator for the Metabolic Studio and a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Art at UCLA.
In 2024 they co-curated the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption(2024–25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Recent curatorial projects include Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2022), Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate with Warren Neidich, Renée Petropoulos, and Christina Strassfield at Guild Hall, East Hampton Main Beach, New York (2022) and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica State Beach, California (2023), and eX-aMEN-ing Masculinities with LA Freewaves at Los Angeles State Historic Park in 2022.
Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture(Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They are a contributor to art periodicals including Artforum, Art in America, Artillery, X-TRA, and publications from Paper Monument, Archive Books, Heyday Press, Routledge, Wiley, and Oxford University Press. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.
More Information
Tickets cost $15 and can be purchased here.
Doors open at 6:30 pm and the film screening begins at 7:00 pm with a runtime of 49 minutes. A conversation with Arjuna Neuman and Anuradha Vikram will follow the film.
Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime. In-store ticket purchases are subject to availability, first-come, first-served. All Sales Final.