ARTIST FILM SERIES RETURNS TO MOCA GRAND AVENUE

Fiction Contract, 2025
HD video (color, sound)
9 min, 11 sec

Vital, 2025
HD video (color, sound)
15 min, 58 sec

CRIP TIME, 2018
HD video (color, sound)
10 min

Pre-Existing Condition, 2019
HD video (color, sound)
6 min

Carolyn Lazard shot Fiction Contract and Vital in adjoining rooms of the same simulation center at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, one of the flagship public hospitals in the NYC Health + Hospitals (NYC H+H) system. The simulation center seen in the films is a dedicated training environment where medical professionals rehearse procedures with one another and with mannequins to improve patient care. Equipped with two-way mirrors and recording systems, the space enables real-time observation and later review, embedding surveillance into the process of learning and evaluation.

Vital is a work of fiction depicting a Black birthing person’s first prenatal visit. Fiction Contract documents a childbirth simulation facilitated by the Maternal Mortality Reduction Program (MMRP). Across all five boroughs of New York City, this team trains medical professionals through complex childbirth simulations. NYC H+H selected an all-Black team of administrators, midwives, doctors, and nurses for this simulation. It was performed with and by Jayda, a Black birthing mannequin who can simulate different complex childbirth scenarios. The term “fiction contract” refers to the mutual agreement among simulation participants. In this enactment—which itself may constitute a social contract for performance—the simulation scenario is established as a constructed, but immersive environment. Participants agree to engage with the scenario as if it were real, while remaining aware that it is not.

In CRIP TIME, Carolyn Lazard methodically replenishes an assortment of brightly colored pill boxes, their labels worn from use. One by one, each pill keeps time like an irregular clock. Lazard uses the durational medium of video to transform a seemingly mundane task into a new way of measuring time—one that reflects the experience of living with chronic illness. The concept of “crip time” rejects capitalist notions of worth and value that suggest we must always move forward and keep producing. In Lazard’s words,“the body is too unwieldy to fit within the schema of authoritative interpretation.”

Carolyn Lazard’s Pre-Existing Condition delves into the history of Dr. Albert M. Kligman (1916–2010), a professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania who oversaw medical experiments conducted on incarcerated people at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia between 1951 and 1974. These non-therapeutic tests ranged from athlete’s foot powders, dandruff shampoos, deodorants, detergents, as well as more hazardous materials such as dioxin, radioactive isotopes, and mind-altering psychotropics. Dr Kligman’s experiments ended in 1974 with congressional hearings and lawsuits as the tests were a breach of the Nuremberg Code of 1947.

Many of the people who underwent these experiments continue to live with long-term health conditions as a consequence of their participation and are still seeking financial compensation and an acknowledgement from the University of Pennsylvania. Pre-Existing Condition shows the university’s complicity at Holmesburg through two archives: the University of Pennsylvania Archives and the Philadelphia City Archives. Over the course of the video, Lazard moves us through a series of documents and a conversation with the Holmesburg experimentation survivor and advocate Edward Yusuf Anthony, locating the tension between personal history and official records.

This screening represents the West Coast premiere of Fiction Contract, Vital,CRIP TIME, and Pre-Existing Condition.

Carolyn Lazard (b. 1987, San Bernardino, CA) is an artist whose primary medium is iteration. They also work across video, sculpture, installation, and performance. Their practice remembers the generative incapacity of debility. Lazard has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig; Trautwein Herleth, Berlin; and Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York. Their work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux. Lazard was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2019 and 2024, Greater New York in 2021, the Venice Biennale in 2022, and the NGV Triennial in 2023. Lazard is a Pew Fellow, a Ford Disability Futures Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow. They teach at Bard College in the Hudson Valley.

Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances.

Hemel, 2024
16 mm transferred to digital video, sound
29 min, 44 sec

Danielle Dean’s film is a portrait of Hemel Hempstead, England, where she was raised, and unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history as a planned community under the New Towns Act of 1946. Titled Hemel, the work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi horror B-movie shot in town about the arrival of a non-human entity that infiltrates the minds of residents and endangers life with a toxic black slime. Playing a composite character based on herself and the movie’s detective protagonist, Dean brings together real and imagined worlds, both past and present. Hemel blurs fiction and documentary to expand a critical reading of the colonial overtones in the original movie, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class, and labour dynamics of a small English town in the post-Brexit context.

This screening represents the West Coast premiere of Hemel.

Working with archives, social practice, performance, video, drawing, and sculpture, Danielle Dean investigates the recursive loops between the circulation of ideas, the history of colonialism, and the material reproduction of global capitalism. Operating across media and with a variety of collaborators and participants, she tries to find fault lines of failure and futurity within this seemingly closed circuit. Born in Alabama to a Nigerian father and an English mother and raised in London, she draws on this multinational background to examine how advertising, film, architecture, media, and corporate culture influence bodies, desires, politics, and everyday life. Dean received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Spike Island, UK (2025), Mercer Union, Toronto (2024), Times Square Arts, NY (2023), ICA San Diego, CA (2023), Tate Britain, London (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2018). Other public presentations include Performa 21 (2021) and The Whitney Biennial (2022). Group exhibitions include shows at the Contemporary Austin (2023), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam(2018), Lafayette Anticipation, Paris (2018), and the Made in L.A. Biennial at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). Her work is held in prestigious collections around the world, such as the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Arts Council collection, London, to name a few.

Cauleen Smith is a Los Angeles-based artist who makes films, installations, and objects that reflect upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination.

A Child Already Knows, 2024
Video (color, sound)
33 min

A Child Already Knows is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same era. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make and made impossible in a place of no return. While children’s stories often expound a moral tale, A Child Already Knows presents a child as protagonist caught in complex and ambiguous retelling. Such scenes of Shanghai during the Cold War are harder to pin down, sometimes unsettling. The child becomes increasingly aware of the world of adult secrets. A television is flickering. Train sounds whir.

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Sia’s films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and elsewhere. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; and The Mudam, Luxembourg. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; Argo Factory: Pejman Foundation, Tehran; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and elsewhere. Sia is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024), a compendium of essays that makes a case for fugitive, exilic cinema, moving beyond national identity and the politics of place as a critical lens. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October, and more. The recipient of the Baloise Art Prize in 2024, Sia has given talks at Dia Art Foundation, Stanford University, Yale University, and has taught at Cooper Union. Sia currently lives and works in New York.

Simon Leung, who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, is a project-based artist whose foremost concern is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced.

INTERIOR HOUSE NIGHT, 2026
HD video (color, sound)
A live-action film about objects gone missing with animated elements and practical effects.

La Lámpara, 2026
HD video (color, sound)
The Voyeur watches women dress-and-undress, with translation and narration by Lazaro.

Title Sequence, 2026
HD video (color, sound)
2 min
A series of movie titles manipulated and modified using the computer.

Mountain of the Collapse, 2022
HD video (color, sound by Caye Castagnetto)
3 min
A collection of recycled materials emulates a mountain, unnaturally spinning counterclockwise, and at high speeds.

This screening represents the world premiere of INTERIOR HOUSE NIGHTand La Lámapara.

Aimee Goguen (b. Los Angeles, California) lives and works remotely. Goguen examines degradation, voyeurism, vulnerability, and power in relation to human behavior. She reclaims the grotesque and the process of trauma by crafting scenarios that re-imagine societal and inter-subjective dynamics as staged, repetitive actions, where accustomed exploitation is heightened and thereby critiqued. Goguen’s format is both analog-and-digital, prioritizing hand-made processes. Goguen’s video work has been exhibited at various locations including American Cement at The American Cement Building, LA (2026); dark dark room, ACP, LA (2024); Mountain of the Collapse, JOAN, LA (2022); and Accidentally on Purpose, Panel, LA (2017). Screening at venues including 2220 Arts+Archives, LA (2025); REDCAT, LA (2020); White Columns, NY (2014); and Vox Populi, PA (2013). Goguen’s video work has been included in such anthologies as Bee Reaved (2021) by Dodie Bellamy and The Oxford Companion to Queer Cinema (2021) reviewed by William J. Simmons.

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN.