ABIGAIL RAPHAEL COLLINS

BLACKOUT is an experimental documentary that explores ways the entertainment industry fills in the gaps left by the US military's redactions. Beginning with the director's father, a method actor with PTSD, BLACKOUT listens carefully to what remains unspeakable, both in the home and on the screen, to preserve the intricate relationship between fictional content and global warfare.

TRT 44min

Director/DP: Abigail Raphael Collins

Editor: Katrin Ebersohn

Sound: Casey Minatrea, Bruce Chianese

Research Assistance: Chloe Reyes, Evelyn Yin

Special Thanks: Oscar Valenzuela, Paul Collins, dean erdmann, Ellen Raphael

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and a residency at Shandaken: Storm King

Quiet Set is a work in progress devoted to four queer filmmakers from the 1920s/30s. Dorothy Arzner, Esther Eng, Leontine Sagan and Tazuko Sakane all worked during the transition from silent film to “talkies.” Across the series I attend to gaps in the archives of these filmmakers, listening to what could not be said at the time and working with the silences in queer film history, as well as working with ways the technological advances in sound and silence changed their work.

Work in progress from this project was screened at Union Docs in 2023 and exhibited in 2021 in an exhibition about queer kinship alongside EJ Hill, Ohan Breiding, Joshua Ross and dean erdmann.

Quiet Set is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature

Curated by Abigail Raphael Collins at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

January - March 2020

Exhibition Catalog + Exhibition Essay by Samira Yamin

SOUND OFF: Silence + Resistance takes up silence as a tool for political resistance. The work by each artist and activist in the exhibition engages silence as a way to honor the inarticulable, defy demands of production, prioritize deep listening, and refuse to incriminate. Rather than negate the importance of speaking up, speaking truth to power, or raising our voices, this exhibition treats silence as a powerful tool of resistance alongside speech.

Listening is central to almost every work in this exhibition, and it’s been central to the process of curating it. In the work I make as an artist I explore gaps and silences carved out by political trauma, but in addition to that solo work I wanted to think in tandem with other artists about the power of silence as a tool for collective action. Curating work at the intersection of protest and silence is a way to listen to other artists and activists about how we can uphold silence together to shift entrenched power structures.

I approached each work with these questions: How does silent protest function in tandem with sounding? How are they interdependent? How is honoring interiority a political act? How is the right to opacity linked to the right to inaudibility? What does an intersectional feminist refusal to speak sound like?

Each work answers and refuses an answer in different ways. Each artist and activist found a different way to transform being silenced into wielding silence.

Artists:

Pauline Boudry + Renate Lorenz

Nikita Gale

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Sharon Hayes

Baseera Khan

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Aliza Shvarts

To View a Plastic Flower (2020) at Los Angeles Municipal Gallery presents three discrete installations that register the presence and absence of information, movement, and optics through each artist’s point of view set within the theater of military engagement. Abigail Raphael Collins’ experimental documentary and video installation, Out of Play, investigates the relationship between the entertainment industry and U.S. military, and the fictions constructed in the absence of information. T. Kim-Trang Tran’s three-channel video installation, Movements: Battles and Solidarity, coalesces seemingly disparate events during the early 1970s in high fashion, labor unrest, and the Vietnam War by exploring the shared sociopolitical and physical “movements.” The sculptural work in Samira Yamin’s Passing Obliquely From One Medium Into Another examines contemporary war photography by manipulating the viewership of mass media through carved optical glass. Yamin’s obfuscation of images challenges viewers to invest in new ways of seeing in order to reassemble refracted and misaligned information. These installations also offer an opportunity to consider and exercise site—whether within the civic space of Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the image magic created by Hollywood, or the greater, postmodern landscape of the United States—and the material aspects of viewing and being.

- Curator Steven Wong

Director/DP: Abigail Raphael Collins

Editor: Katrin Ebersohn

Sound: Casey Minatrea, Bruce Chianese

Research Assistance: Chloe Reyes, Evelyn Yin

Special Thanks: Oscar Valenzuela, Paul Collins, Dean Erdmann, Ellen Raphael, National Archives and Records Administration

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and a residency at Shandaken: Storm King

This experimental documentary work investigates the sound of drones over Gaza.

Presented as a part of UCLA MFA exhibition in April 2015

TRT 13:33min

Single channel video with audio

4:42 min

2013/2015

10 written images of photographs taken in the West Bank, Palestine in 2012. 

Published in Haunt Journal of Art Vol 2

http://hauntjournal.org/

An interview between myself and an LAPD Lieutenant about aerial views in crime scene investigations. Drone footage shot in 29 Palms California near the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. 

Single channel video projected onto a leaning 20' x 12' wall

TRT 5:13 min

The clip projected onto three sides of the X is found footage taken from B'Tselem. http://www.btselem.org/ The footage is shot by a Palestinian family documenting a night raid on their home in the West Bank by Israeli Defense Force soldiers. On the fourth side of the X is an 8' photograph of an IDF soldier hiding his face from the camera. This image is illuminated and hidden intermittently by the light from the projectors. 

Three channel installation projected onto an 8' x 8' drywall structure

3 min continuous loop

2010

A series of three flip books looking into how US veterans perceive and inhabit the city they return to. Azimuth is a mapping system used both to help soldiers physically locate themselves in foreign hostile environments, as well a phrase referring to psychological re-orientation upon their return home. Using a form of this mapping system, I photographed US american landscapes from 360 degrees. The images are accompanied by text from four veteran’s attempts to use this mapping method in social situations, as well as descriptions of the technique from military manuals.