LACE Presents: Artists’ Film International
Saturday, August 2, 2025, 2–7 PM
Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles, CA
3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Limited free parking available on site
Free admission | RSVP here
Read about all the artists and films in Artists’ Film International here.
LACE is proud to present the 2025 edition of Artists’ Film International (AFI’25), a touring film program which is collectively curated and presented by sixteen international arts organizations and convened by Forma. AFI’25 introduces the work of talented moving image artists to worldwide audiences, and will be live over 300 days, with exhibitions, screenings and public programs hosted across four continents.
This year the AFI partners have commissioned or selected recent artists’ films which respond to the theme “Dream States.” AFI’25 delves into the transformative power of dreaming as a space for processing the past and envisioning alternative futures. Exploring the dynamic relationship between personal and political landscapes, AFI’25 investigates how individual consciousness and external realities converge to drive change. The program looks to films that explore how the emancipatory quality of dreams and altered states of reality can reshape the physical and psychological boundaries around us, challenge established norms, and confront the status quo.
LACE’s selection for AFI’25 is Leymusoom Garden: New Sun (2024) by Heesoo Kwon. Kwon’s oneiric visual language and unique animation style allow her to create memoryscapes of personal and community liberation. The film rewrites mythical matrilineal histories through utopian and whimsical abstractions of time, space, and memory to ultimately bring forth healing and transformation.
Additionally, from 2–4pm, artist Hedy Torres performs Giving Back the Fruits in the courtyard of the Philosophical Research Society. This performance-installation expands on Torres’ ongoing work exploring the lives of street vendors, as well as her personal experience as one in Los Angeles. With this project, Torres recreates the conditions of her street vending days in collaboration with fellow street vendor Marlen Benitez. The project highlights the resilience and challenges faced by street vendors in Los Angeles, while giving back to the community by distributing free fruit to attendees and passersby.
About Leymusoom Garden: New Sun, 2024
Leymusoom Garden encapsulates Kwon’s spiritual journey and life trajectory from late 2022 to early 2024. Created in the digital realm, Leymusoom Garden incorporates 3D-scanned models of her grandparents’ land in Gongju-si, South Korea, alongside her home studio and garden during the production period, located on the unceded ancestral land of the Ramaytush Ohlone people (now known as San Francisco). Through this sanctuary, Kwon reflects on the complexities of relationships and life values, embracing acceptance and healing as she navigates unexpected losses and transformative transitions in her artistic journey.
Exploring Korean shamanistic perspectives through the myths of Dokkaebi (mythical creatures from Korean folklore) and Mago, alongside the Indigenous creation story of Skywoman, enabled Kwon to confront her maternal family history and personal experiences. Magohalmi (마고할미 or Mago 마고) is a powerful female deity from Korean shamanic mythology—a creator, progenitor, and sovereign of humanity, nature, and all geographical formations. In Leymusoom Garden, Mago is reimagined as Kwon’s paternal great-grandmother.
About the Artists
Heesoo Kwon (she/they) is a Korean-born multimedia artist who considers art-making a socio-ritualistic, archival and auto-ethnographic practice. Employing 3D animation, modeling and artificial intelligence technologies as procreant, shamanic tools, she engages in the queering of familial relationships, the rewriting of mythic matrilineal histories, and the building of decentralized worlds and memoryscapes, as seen in her autobiographical feminist religion Leymusoom and her Firefly series of AI-augmented childhood photographs. In Kwon’s heterotopic hyperspaces, she abstracts (conceptions of) time and memory, transcending the burdens/legacies of sacrifice, trauma and patriarchal violence to offer instead transformative modes of liberated existence, love and community.
Selected exhibitions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Buk Seoul Museum of Arts, Seoul, South Korea; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands; EFA Project Space, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, San Jose, CA; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Blinkers Art & Project Space, Winnipeg, Canada; West Den Haag, Netherlands; and WMA Space, Hong Kong. She was awarded the 2023 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia and the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.
Hedy Torres is a Mexican-born artist currently based in Los Angeles, CA. She immigrated to the United States in 2006, overcoming numerous challenges to pursue her passion for art. Having worked as a street vendor during her early years here, she was profoundly influenced by the struggles and stories of immigrants and street vendors, which now form the core of her artistic exploration. Torres’ work also extends to the broader immigrant experience, aiming to highlight the often-overlooked narratives of her communities.
Torres holds a Master of Arts degree with an emphasis on Painting and Drawing from California State University, Northridge. Her creative accomplishments include several solo exhibitions, such as Serve Somebody at Seis Gallery (2023) and Soy, De Aquí Y Allá (I Am from Here and There) at Olympic Club in Santa Monica (2023). She has participated in group exhibitions at prestigious venues such as Charlie James Gallery, Brea Gallery, and LA Lakers’ In the Paint program with Band of Vices gallery.
Through her work, Torres aims to foster empathy and understanding, inviting audiences to contemplate the complexities of the human experience, particularly the stories of hardworking individuals who contribute to the vibrant cultural fabric of Los Angeles.
About Artists’ Film International 2025
Artists’ Film International was established in 2008 by Whitechapel Gallery in London and since its inception has seen 32 international venues collaborate. AFI is an alternative, lateral programme that exemplifies non-hierarchical, borderless and collaborative curatorial models.
Responding to urgent global topics, the programme cultivates collective practice and cross- cultural dialogue, fosters the exchange of ideas and perspectives, and provides wide reaching visibility for artists.
Convened by Forma, Artists’ Film International 2025 is co-curated and co-presented by fifteen arts organizations across four continents. AFI’25 celebrates artists’ moving image work centering on the theme of Dream States.
SUPPORT
This program is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thanks to our friends at PRS for their support while LACE’s Hollywood gallery is under renovation.
