Curated together by Rotations’ Corina Copp, JOAN’s Suzy Halajian, and artist Alexis Kyle Mitchell, this two-night screening and reading programme commemorates the final days of Mitchell’s exhibition The Goal of Our Health, on view at JOAN through January 31.

Events for a Moving Body constellates transtemporal moving images that bring into view the body in its sensorial labours—Jacqui Duckworth, Julie Dash, Peter Weiss, Margaret Raspé—with anachronistic works by artists Onyeka Igwe, Yelena Gluzman, Sarah Ballard, and Mary Helena Clark, among others. The programme brings together films and readings that think with the body as a site of knowledge, relation, and struggle. Spanning archival and contemporary experimental, ethnographic, and transnational queer, feminist and artist cinema practices, these works reflect on athleticism, performance, hysteria, spirit, and human–animal ecologies; extending Mitchell’s inquiry into how embodied knowledge resists the limits imposed on bodies by medical, economic, social, and ideological structures.

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From the Cinenova Collection, the programme features:

A PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH d. Jacqui Duckworth, 1991, 20 min.

A Prayer Before Birth confronts debilitating illness with creative vitality, simultaneously desperate and defiant.

In a text responding to the film, Nat Raha writes that in “the space that emerges between fiction, personal experience and surrealism, A Prayer enacts an avant-garde lesbian aesthetic working to come to terms with being in a disabled body, that places the emotional turbulence of this experience front and centre while confronting affects through which ableism coheres.” To read the full text.