Still from Coyolxauhqui (2017), by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Courtesy of the artists.
Obsidian Reflections
Saturday, July 19, 2025, 2–5 PM
Philosophical Research Society
3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Limited free parking available on site
Free admission | RSVP link coming soon!
LACE Screening Room presents Obsidian Reflections curated by Selene Preciado with Andrea Acuña. This film program presents a selection of video works that integrate ancestral knowledge and storytelling, imagining futures where the past and present connect through the power of ruins and resilience. Obsidian Reflections features films by Edgar Calel, Mariana Castillo Deball, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Theo Jean Cuthand, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Sky Hopinka, Kite, Caroline Monnet, Javier Ocampo Hernández, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, and Skawennati.
The program is followed by a musical performance with multimedia NeoCumbia artist El Keamo (@el_keamo).
Film Program
- Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Opossum Resilience (2019), 16:01 minutes
- Edgar Calel, Xar –Sueño de obsidiana (2020), 13:06 minutes
- Caroline Monnet, Ikwé (2009), 4:45 minutes
- Kite, Winyan Yamni (Triple Woman): Three Dreams (2021), 13:51 minutes
- Sky Hopinka, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), 4:13 minutes
- Theo Jean Cuthand, Reclamation (2018), 13:11 minutes
- Javier Ocampo Hernández, DECULO NIZADOR (2023), 3:27 minutes
- Skawennati, The Peacemaker Returns (2017), 18:36 minutes
- Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Coyolxauhqui (2017), 9:46 min
- Mariana Castillo Deball, There is a space later in time where you are just a memory (2010), 7:00 minutes
- Cannupa Hanska Luger, Shadow holding shape to experience the energy of the sun. Future Ancestral Technologies (2021), 5:00 minutes
About the Artists
Edgar Calel is a Maya Kaqchikel artist and poet from the midwestern highlands of Guatemala. His work delves into the cosmology of his people and how it uncomfortably interacts with Western epistemologies and systems of value. His practice often interrogates the relationships between indigeneity and its representation in the modern world, negotiating the untranslatability of specific ways of being in the world and the words that name them. Inevitably, this leads to a position of resistance to specific forms of symbolic and physical violence and discrimination Indigenous people endure in Latin America. Calel describes his practice not as art—a nonexistent word in Maya languages—in the Western sense, but as Naoj: a conflation of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. His work manifests as a communal form for production that involves his whole family and is connected to the activities that produce and maintain life in Chi Xot.
Mariana Castillo Deball takes a kaleidoscopic approach to her practice, mediating between science, archaeology, and the visual arts and exploring the way in which these disciplines describe the world. Her installations, performances, sculptures, and editorial projects arise from the recombination of different languages that seek to understand the role objects play in our identity and history. Her works result from a long research process, allowing her to study the different ways in which a historical object can be read as it presents a version of reality that informs and blends into a polyphonic panorama. Seeking to initiate a dialogue with institutions and museums beyond contemporary art, she collaborates with ethnographic collections, libraries, and historical archives. She often produces multiples —books or objects with different uses and formats— to explore how they might generate new territories. Weaving her way through the fields of anthropology, philosophy, and literature, Castillo Deball draws inspiration from a wide range of sources as she engages in the exchange of knowledge as a transforming process for everyone involved. She has been teaching as a professor of Sculpture at Münster Academy of Art since 2015.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos was founded in Tehuacán, Mexico, in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analogue mediums, interventions on archival materials, agitprop, mythology, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations in documentary and cinematography produce visual and auditory impressions that are political possibilities in their own right. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the Bienal de la Imagen Movimiento in Buenos Aires, International Film Festival Rotterdam, RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival, Images Festival; Media City Film Festival, Ambulante Cine Documental, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Festival Internacional de Cine FILMADRID among many others. Their collection of poetry Solares was published by Evidence Press at the Centre for Expanded Poetics (Montréal, 2018).
Theo Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 he has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Ann Arbour Film Festival, Images in Toronto, Berlinale in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Outfest, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. His work has also been exhibited at galleries including the Remai in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, MoMA in New York, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and his Masters of Arts in Media Production at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2015. He has made commissioned work for Urban Shaman and Videopool in Winnipeg, Cinema Politica in Montreal, VIMAF in Vancouver, and Bawaadan Collective in Canada. In 2020 he completed working on a 2D video game called A Bipolar Journey based on his experience learning and dealing with his bipolar disorder. In 2023 he completed his second video game, Carmilla the Lonely. He has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 he won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. He is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. He has made 32 videos and films and counting. Currently he has a feature film in development. He is a trans man who uses He/Him pronouns. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada. He is currently Indigenous-Artist-In-Residence at Western University.
Cannupa Hanska Luger (b.1979) is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Incorporating ceramics, steel, fiber, repurposed materials, video, sound and performance, Luger activates speculative fiction, engages in land-based actions of repair and practices empathetic response through social collaboration. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages. His bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview.
Luger is a 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow and a 2025 Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award recipient. He received a 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and is a 2024 Monument Lab Fellow. He is a 2023 SOROS Arts Fellow, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft and was named a 2021 GRIST Change Maker. Luger is a 2020 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2018 inaugural Burke Prize. Luger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates, the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Kunsthal KAdE, Netherlands, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Georgia, among others. His work is in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, Nordamerika Native Museum, Zürich, Switzerland, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Luger is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and Palm Springs, California. In Portland, Oregon he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial, the 2021 edition of Prospect.5, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea and the Göteborg International Biennial in Switzerland in 2023. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies–Bard College in 2020, at LUMA in Arles, France in 2022, and in 2024 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA and Kunsthalle Friart in Switzerland. His films, videos, and photographs are in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, The Whitney Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center amongst others. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is an assistant professor in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
El Keamo is the alias of Alfredo González-Martínez, a first-generation Mexican-American multimedia artist from Reseda, California. With an innovative blend of cumbia sonidera, tribal, house, and acid genres, El Keamo’s Neocumbia project is a modern interpretation of traditional Latin rhythms fused with electronic synthesis, creating a unique sound that is both familiar and boldly avant-garde.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite (b. 1990, Sylmar, CA; lives in Catskill, NY) is an Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and scholar. Her artworks and performances have recently been featured at the 2024 Whitney Biennial; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York; and the 2024 Shanghai Biennial; among other venues. Her awards and honors include a Ruth Award, a 2023 United States Artist Fellowship, a Creative Time open call commission (with Alisha Wormsley), and a Creative Capital grant. She is currently Director of Wihanble S’a Lab, Distinguished Artist in Residence, and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard College. Kite holds degrees from California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, and received her PhD from Concordia University.
Known for her sound and video performance with her Machine Learning hair-braid interface, Kite’s groundbreaking scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance, often working in collaboration with family and community members. Kite develops body interfaces for machine learning driven performance, sculptures generated by dreams, and experimental sound and video work. Working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013, Kite is the first American Indian artist to utilize Machine Learning in art practice. Kite is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) is a multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Quebec. Deploying visual and media arts to demonstrate complex ideas, Monnet renders Indigenous identity and bicultural living through an examination of shifting cultural histories. She is noted for working with industrial materials processes, blending vocabularies of popular and traditional visual knowledge with tropes of modernist abstraction to create a unique formal language. Consistently occupying the stage of experimentation and invention, her work grapples with the impact of colonialism by updating outdated systems with Indigenous methodologies.
Monnet studied Sociology and Communication at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and the University of Granada (Spain) before pursuing a career in visual arts and film. Her work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial (NYC), Toronto Biennal of Art, KØS museum (Copenhagen), Museum of Contemporary Art (Montréal), the National Art Gallery (Ottawa). Solo exhibitions include Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Arsenal Contemporary (NYC), Centre d’art international de Vassivière (France) and the Art Museum at University of Toronto. Her work is included in numerous collections in North America as well as the permanent UNESCO collection in Paris. She is based in Montréal and is represented by Blouin-Division Gallery.
Javier Ocampo Hernández (b. 1988, Cuernavaca Morelos, Mexico) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work derives from his affective experiences, political beliefs, and conceptions of what it means to be homosexual in Mexico, a dark-skinned person in a racist country, from unprivileged lower class, and being an inhabitant of the periphery, formerly called provincial region. He has a BA in Fine Arts and a Masters in Artistic Production from Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, UAEM, and is a 2015-2017 fellow of the National Council of Science and Technology (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologίa, CONACyT). His work has been exhibited and awarded in several contemporary art biennials and festivals, including at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC); Arte Joven Aguascalientes, Mexico; 6th Biennial UAEMEX, Mexico; Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA; Hamburger Bahnhof Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Centro Cultural de España en México; Festival Cervantino, Guanajuato; CLOSE UP Vallarta; Capital Ibero-americana da Juventude, Braga, Portugal; Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, Germany; and Tanzhaus Zürich, Switzerland, among others. He is an educator at La Tallera Siqueiros, and Centro de Desarrollo Comunitario Los Chocolates in Cuernavaca, Morelos.
Naomi Rincón-Gallardo is a visual artist living and working between Mexico City and Oaxaca. From a decolonial-cuir perspective, her research-driven critical-mythical dreamlike worldmakings address the creation of counter-worlds in neocolonial settings. In her work she integrates her interests in theater games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer of color critique. She completed the PhD in Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Recent shows and performative screenings include: Tzitzimime Trilogy, la Casa Encendida Madrid (2023); 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); A Trilogy of Caves, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (2020); May your thunder break the sky, Kunstraum Innsbruck, 11 Berlin Biennale (2020); Heavy Blood, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2019). En Cuatro Patas, Performative Screening for Pacific Standard Time. LA/LA at The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2018); FEMSA Biennial: We have Never Been Contemporary, Zacatecas (2018); and The Formaldehyde Trip, Performative screening at SFMOMA, San Francisco CA (2017).
Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. Her machinimas and machinimagraphs (movies and still images made in virtual environments), textiles and sculpture have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others.
Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-founded and co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network based at Concordia University, where she received her BFA. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal. She is represented by ELLEPHANT.
About the Curators
Andrea Acuña recently obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Film, with an emphasis on Chicana/o/x and Indigenous Studies from California State University, Los Angeles. Raised between Mexicali, Baja California, and Los Angeles, Andrea’s curatorial work explores the moving image alongside multidisciplinary approaches that integrate storytelling. Committed to amplifying BIPOC and queer voices, her work centers on themes of transformation, land gratitude, community, and the lasting impacts of colonization on our systems and societies. Through both artistic and curatorial practices, Andrea seeks to highlight the strength and creativity of her communities in both historical and contemporary contexts. Passionate about storytelling, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary engagement, she is dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding and respect for ancestral knowledge.
Selene Preciado (she/her) is the Curator and Director of Programs at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) since 2023. Preciado’s curatorial practice is research- and history-based, approaching topics such as memory, language, place/diaspora, ritual, and popular culture through experimental perspectives. Selected curatorial projects include the performance series ENDURANCE (May 2025) and ABUNDANCE (April 2024, co-curated with Juan Silverio), presented by LACE at L.A. Dance Project; Collidoscope: A de la Torre Brothers Retro-Perspective, at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture, organized in conjunction with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino (2022–2023, ongoing national tour); Ser todo es ser parte/To be Whole is to be Part, LACE (2020); Desecho, a performance project by Regina José Galindo for Zona Maco, Mexico City (2017), Customizing Language, the inaugural exhibition of the Emerging Curators Program at LACE co-curated with Idurre Alonso (2016); and José Montoya’s Abundant Harvest: Works on Paper/Works on Life, co-curated with Richard Montoya at the Fowler Museum at UCLA (2016). Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Preciado obtained a BA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and holds an MA in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California (USC).
About the LACE Screening Room
The LACE Screening Room is a moving image series organized by LACE and curated by guest curators at Philosophical Research Society while LACE’s home on Hollywood Boulevard is under renovation. Click here for more information on LACE’s gallery.
This program is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thanks to Video Data Bank and our friends at PRS for their support while LACE’s Hollywood gallery is under renovation.
