Sound-Forward Screenings was a “film club” hosted & curated by Kolya Shields and Kian Braulik at Pyxis Sound Space Providence. We focused on the “underbelly” of the Avant-Garde, exploring how the institutionalization and canonization of late 20th-century experimental performance went hand-in-hand with the gentrification and policing of poor, often majority-Black neighborhoods in de-industrialized US/UK cities. However, as these films display, this extractive dynamic does not define marginalized subjects’ unexpected, blistering use & appropriation of “experimental” or “alternative” art, nor the revolutionary history of the “avant-garde.”
kolya shields 