Floating Cinema 2025

Giudecca

Kenneth Tam: The Founding of the World, 2023 - 14'19"

The Founding of the World explores how private ritual can be used to build spaces of community and identity between young men of Asian descent. The video takes as inspiration the ritual of the probate—a performance that incorporates synchronized choreographies as part of an elaborate initiation process used in certain American fraternities and sororities.  These groups are found on college campuses throughout the country, and though they differ widely in their composition and function, they are at heart meant to serve as spaces for young people to socialize and create deep bonds with each other. 

Nadia Huggins: Circa no Future, 2016-2019 - 3'00"

Believing there to be a link between an under-explored aspect of Caribbean adolescent masculinity and the freedom of bodies in the ocean, the author creatively documents boys' interaction with the sea. These pieces capture manhood, snippets of vulnerability, and moments of abstraction that often go unrecognized. The ocean itself takes on a personality — that of the embracing mother providing a safe space for being, both archetypal and poignant.

Kaldi Moss: Of the Millions of Possibilities, 2020 - 10'13”

Born in a world after plastics, after the world wars, after the holocaust, after the nuclear bomb, a world with an abundance of pollution and fear. It offers no alternative and very few places to hide. One cannot run away. Belonging to pollution, one participates in producing the discomfort one feels. This work explores the relationship between pollution and freedom. 

Emilija Škarnulytė: Xirasia, 2023 - 7'04"
Commissioned by TBA21–Academy and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for st_age

Inspired by Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas’ theories (1921-1994), and specifically a new interdisciplinary field she developed in the 1980s that studies archaeology through an emphasis on the beliefs, rituals, social structure, and symbolism of ancient societies, and which she termed “archaeomythology,” in Xirasia, Škarnulytė seeks to uncover the specters of human action lost in the wash of millennia, from its Neolithic immanent past to the ecological scars left by the myth of capital on fluvial sediments. 

Nadia Huggins was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where she is currently based. A self-taught artist, she works in photography and, since 2010, has built a body of images characterized by her observation of and interest in the everyday. Her work merges documentary and conceptual practices, which explore ecology, belonging, identity, and memory through a contemporary approach focused on re-presenting Caribbean landscapes and the sea. Huggins' photographs have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, the US, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Ethiopia, Guadeloupe, France, and the Dominican Republic. She has had solo shows in the US at KJCC/NYU, NYC and at The Betsy Hotel, Miami, and in Europe in London and at Now Gallery. Her work forms part of the collection of The Wedge Collection (Toronto, Canada), The National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston), and The Art Museum of the Americas (Washington, DC, USA).

Kaldi Moss is a multidisciplinary artist from India whose practice spans sound, film, browser-based art and bio art. They are interested in sense perception, time, networked systems, insect perception, tree intelligence and experiences of beings that are not human. They have been an invited artist at IFMZ, Zurich, Switzerland, for Studio Residency supported by ProHelvetia (2024), Hertz Lab, ZKM, Karlsruhe, supported by Goethe Institut, Bangalore (2022) and Live Arts workshop, Khoj International Artists’ association, New Delhi (2022). In addition, Moss has been a hacker-in-residence at the Swiss Mechatronics Art Society (2024) and artist-in-residence at the Interim program at Srishti-Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology (2023). Their video and installation work has been shown in multiple exhibitions in Toronto, Dresden, Brighton, Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Himachal and Goa. Moss has co-founded the collective NOTAAT with artist Puneet Jain. NOTAAT’s work titled »Creation of Birds« was shown at the ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) conference in 2021. They are the artistic director of Walkin Studios, an independent multidisciplinary art studio and project space in Bangalore, India.

Emilija Škarnulytė is an artist and filmmaker born in Vilnius, Lithuania. Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Winner of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, Škarnulytė represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano and was included in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. With solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (2021), Kunsthaus Pasquart (2021), Den Frie (2021), National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2021), CAC (2015) and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (2017), she has participated in group shows at Ballroom Marfa, Seoul Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation, and the First Riga Biennial. In 2022, Škarnulytė participated in the group exhibition Penumbra, organized by Fondazione In Between Art Film on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale. She is a founder and currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway and is a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective, recently commissioned for a new work by the First Toronto Biennial.

Kenneth Tam was born in Queens, NY and attended the Cooper Union.  He is based in Houston, TX and Queens, NY, and is an assistant professor at Rice University, as well as faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.  Selected solo exhibitions include Bridget Donahue, NY; ICA LA, CA; Queens Museum, NY;  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), CA; Ballroom Marfa, TX; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, MA. He is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Tam uses video, sculpture, installation, movement and performance to examine themes including the performance of masculinity, the transformative potential of ritual, and expressions of intimacy within groups. Tam often implicates the male body in his projects, using humor and pathos to reveal the performative and unstable nature of identity, and often creates situations that foreground tenderness and vulnerability within unlikely settings.