Bouchra Khallili’s “The Mapping Journey Project” is a project that resists easy description.

I believe this is primarily by virtue of the many seeming contradictions at play in the piece. First, each video is formally and structurally identical, but the actual content is entirely distinct. Second, the visuals are apparently simple and straightforward, but their explanations and trajectories are particularly convoluted. Third, the piece works to express a vital point about the paths walked by refugees, but does so by powerfully individualizing each refugee’s story.

This is the key to the piece, I think. In our culture, the dominant dialogue regarding refugees is, on both sides of the political spectrum, reductive. The far right reduces refugees to dangerous, fear-inspiring stereotypes, and the far left reduces refugees to the suffering other that will benefit “from” us. For both sides, refugees represent political capital to be used in self-interest. Neither side seems particularly interested in the humanity of those refugees, in the stories of those refugees. And of course, why should they be? The acknowledgement of their narratives can only undermine the cohesion of these constructed narratives.

Khallili resists that dialogue so simply, by literally illustrating how different each refugee’s tale is. Khalili then empowers those same refugees by allowing them to tell their own stories, to draw their own paths. Here, those stories become distinct from the geopolitical consequences and circumstances typically associated with refugees. Issues of sovereignty and statehood are less important to these narratives than the simple facts of their journeys. None of the journeys drawn in permanent marker align with any easily conceivable trajectories or borders. Every map is different, and every journey is wildly unique. The only thing about each person’s story that’s the same is that they each have one.

I felt an odd instinct while looking at Khalili’s piece. I wanted to see all the maps, all the journeys, projected onto one large map of the world. I wanted to see how they overlapped and how they diverged from one another. But Khalili resists that urge too. These maps aren’t maps of the world, they’re maps of stories. So they don’t belong to us, they belong to the storytellers.

Ernie Gehr’s CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS at MoMA is a reconciliation between the old and the new, and a celebration of the formal magic of the moving image.

The main piece in the exhibit is a five-channel video projected onto a large wall. Each channel takes for its source an early 20th century shadowgraph. The shadowgraphs were essentially long strips of paper run through vertical black bars. This interlacing effect would produce the illusion of movement of the figures drawn on the strips. Each shadowgraph in CARNIVAL contains its own narrative sequence; like Gulliver’s Travels, often the comedy or fantasy narratives that were common in early, simplistic animation.

Gehr takes six of these shadowgraphs and projects them next to one another, such that the illusion of horizontal movement continues from one screen to the other, from one black bar to the other. This, along with the many other ways Gehr digitally manipulates and abstracts the shadowgraphs (jumping between vertical lines, decoupling the top half of a figure from the bottom, etc…) leads to the total loss of any narrative cohesion. Instead, we get an endless parade of shadows marching forever rightward (or for the 20 minute runtime of the piece). CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS isn’t a celebration of cinema’s power to tell a narrative; its rejoice is in something much simpler; that inanimate images can be brought to life at all.`   

The piece becomes a celebration of the moving image itself. In its abstractions, and in its size (too large to take in at once), Gehr asks you to participate in the carnival, rather than simply admire it from a distance. I don’t expect that anyone stays for the full 20 minutes. In fact, in the time that I was there, most people stayed for less than one minute. But that struck me much like an actual carnival, where people are so overwhelmed by all the sensual pleasures that surround them, that their attention can only be held for a moment. CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS doesn’t seem to mind. I think it wants to be brief so it can remain delightful. In that dark room, against the wall lit only by the digital projectors, you can walk by and become one of the shadows brought to life by the magic of cinema, marching in their parade.

The first piece of Astro Noise is a screen with two faces. The first side shows the faces of horrified onlookers on 9/11 in slow-motion and without sound. All these people can do is look, and all we can do is see them. In this first image, Laura Poitras makes her thesis statement: the truth is right there in front of us, if we can only bear the horror of looking. Poitras shows us the horror of 9/11 not in the destruction of the actual attacks, but in the faces of the people forced to stand there and see a terrible truth they could do nothing to change.

Walk around the screen, and the sounds of frantic speech take form. Hooded figures are shoved into frame, interrogated in English and Arabic, and often violently ejected from the frame, the echoes of their muffled voices off-camera the only proof of their existence.

Turn the corner, and a carpeted slab sits below a projected star-field on the ceiling. The peace of the room is messied by the people shuffling around on the slab to make room for everyone who wants to lie down. Some people come into the room from the other side and laugh. This is confusing now, but will be clear soon. For now, Poitras only wants you to look.

The tools she uses to demand your attention are always simple, but always effective. Beyond the room with the slab, two dimly lit black corridors are spotted with small viewing rectangles. The content of the rectangles vary from leaked intelligence briefings, to footage from drone strikes, to leaked internal policy memos from a host of government agencies, to secret FISA court orders. But the content is less specifically important than the realization that for each of these items, thousands more exist just like it. Poitras is not interested in the details of the leaked intelligence here, but rather in the shape of it, in the experience of the truth that has been hidden by those we are supposed to trust. Each rectangle can only accommodate a single viewer at a time, and the light inside each is so bright that the moment you step away, you stumble in darkness until your eyes readjust. The truths we finally encounter, Poitras implies, are blinding.

Beyond those corridors is revelation. A large screen dominates one wall, and the odd familiarity of thermal footage of people lying down is unsettling until you realize you’re looking at you, or at least you ten minutes ago. So now you walk back to the room with the slab in the center, and you lie down, and you wave at the camera that was there all along. You look at all the fools lying here in the dark without knowing that they’re being watched, and you realize that you were supposed to come back. The privilege of the secret is intoxicating.

Walk back to the final room. The rest of Astro Noise is icing on the cake. Watch the innocuous footage Laura Poitras shot in Iraq that landed her on a no-fly list, and wonder why our government should be more afraid of being shot by photographers than soldiers. The truth is already so, Poitras’ work pleads, owning up to it doesn’t make it any worse. The final piece of Astro Noise is its simplest, and perhaps most effective. White text scrolls over a black field. “Abie’s iPhone” is one among many names on the screen. The wifi-sniffer is the size of a matchbox. Astro-noise asks you to look, but it never asks if it can look back. It doesn’t need your permission.