e-flux Screening Room presents What are you afraid of?, a three part series of screenings and discussions with films by artists Lex Brown, Leila Weefur, Nile Harris, and Martine Syms. Curated by Daniella Brito, this series examines the horror within the mundane across films that queer the banal to reveal latent fears and desires.

Throughout What are you afraid of?, cinematic strategies ranging from satire to surrealism and aesthetic practices that pull from the worlds of theater, performance art, and speculative fiction, ground scenes that espouse the horror that haunts the everyday. Through these subversive filmic techniques, the series sets out to examine the kind of metaphysical longing that troubles the contemporary moment. This motioning toward escapism is ever present throughout What are you afraid of?: subjects of each selected film embody dissociative states who appear to yearn for other realities. 

Coupled with horror, humor is at times a vehicle of narration. This mechanism glazes over discomfort; makes light of the absurd and offers some reprieve in its place. In doing so, the screenings and conversations that comprise What are you afraid of? invite attendees to determine the following for themselves: Where does the humor end and the horror begin? Together, deploying an assortment of techniques, the artists in this series provoke viewers to slow down and sit with all this collective unease. In doing so, attendees will lean into the unsettling intersection where the subconscious meets tangible reality.

What are you afraid of? unfolds across three screenings followed by discussions taking place at e-flux Screening Room from February through March 2023.

The series opens on February 14 with the world premiere of Lex Brown’s The Glass Eye (2023) and a screening of Brown’s Communication (2021); followed by events on February 16 with a screening of Nile Harris’s fill it with air (call it self care) (2021) and Leila Weefur’s Between Beauty and Horror (2019) and PLAY†PREY: A Gospel (2021); and March 21 with a screening of Martine Syms’s The African Desperate (2022).

Scroll down for links with more details on each event.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Program

Martine Syms, The African Desperate
March 21, 2023, 7pm

Films by Leila Weefur and Nile Harris
February 16, 2023, 7pm

Lex Brown: The Glass Eye and Communication
World premiere and screening
February 14, 2023, 7pm