The MOCA Artist Film Series returns to the Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand Avenue on May 30 and runs through December 5, 2024. Inspired by film and video works in MOCA’s renowned collection and centered in the cinema capital of the world, the series offers engaging and notable screenings and features artists in dialogue with fellow artists, historians, and critics.

MOCA Artist Film Series 2024 Schedule

Zineb Sedira
Dreams Have No Titles, 2022
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Thursday, May 30, 2023
6pm
MOCA presents a screening of Dreams Have No Titles followed by a conversation with artist Zineb Sedira.

Using autobiographical narrative, fiction and documentary, Zineb Sedira’s Dreams Have No Titles–her sprawling, award-winning contribution for the French Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale–addresses history of cultural, intellectual and avant-garde film production of the 1960s and beyond through the history of filmmaking and its impact on postcolonial movements and liberation struggles. In the film, Sedira mines Algeria’s cinema heritage through the archives of the Algerian Cinémathèque, touching upon post-independence cinema in France, Italy and Algeria and the so-called “Third-World” values and aesthetics they adhered to.

Simon Leung
War After War, 2011, 90 mins.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Thursday, June 27, 2024
6pm
MOCA presents a screening of War After War followed by a conversation with artist Simon Leung and writer and curator Michael Ned Holte, Associate Dean, School of Art at Calarts.

In War After War, 2011, artist Simon Leung (Hong Kong, 1964) offers a portrait of the mythical writer, translator, and art world figure Warren Niesłuchowski. The ninety-minute work unravels Niesłuchowski’s life in the first decade of the 21st century as a nomad without a home who depended on others to provide him with a bed for the night, week, month, or longer, while he traveled through North America and Europe as a perpetual guest. The work explores notions of hospitality, mortality, vulnerability, resistance, and living itself as an ethico-aesthetic proposition in the residual space of war. Leung’s video is also a rumination on friendship and the art world.

Seba Calfuqueo
TRAY TRAY KO, 2022, 6 min.
NGÜRÜ KA WILLIÑ (Fox and Otter), 2022, 4 min.
You will never be a Weye (2015), 4 min 46 sec.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Thursday, October 17, 2024
7pm
MOCA presents a screening of several short films by Seba Calfuqueo by a conversation with artist Carolina Caycedo.

Seba Calfuqueo, a Mapuche artist born in 1991 in Santiago de Chile, Ngulumapu/Chile, uses her heritage to critically examine the social, cultural, and political position of Indigenous individuals in modern Chile and Latin America. Presented in Mapudungun with English subtitles, Calfuqueo's videos reinterpret classical Mapuche tales and legends to explore the relationship between the human body and the environment, foregrounding sexuality, land rights, and restitution.

Coco Fusco
La Noche Eterna (The Eternal Night), 2023, 70 min.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Thursday, November 14, 2024
7pm
MOCA presents a screening of La Noche Eterna followed by a conversation with Coco Fusco and scholar Pablo Baler.

In the story told by La Noche Eterna, a poet and a young Evangelical man from the countryside, who have both recently arrived at the prison, meet an older actor who had been imprisoned after he was accused of trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. The actor ushers them into the social world of the prisoners, showing them how to resist the authorities’ attempt to re-educate them. To enliven the prisoners’ evenings, he convinces the warden that screening films would be a more effective means of teaching inmates about the benefits of socialism and creates a cinema inside the prison.

Edgar Calel
Xar – Sueño de obsidiana (Obsidian Dream), 2020, 4 min.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Thursday, December 5, 2024
7pm
MOCA presents a screening of Xar – Sueño de obsidiana alongside two of Calel's recent video works followed by a conversation with artist Beatriz Cortez.

Artist Edgar Calel found himself in São Paulo, Brazil, during the isolating COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Inspired by vivid dreams, he penned a poem that became the script for his video Xar – Sueño de obsidiana. A haunting scene features Calel partially covered by a jaguar hide, traversing the empty expanse of the emblematic Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, designed in 1954 by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer for the São Paulo Biennial. This program will showcase Xar – Sueño de obsidiana, a video made in collaboration with Fernando Pereira dos Santos, alongside two of Calel's recent video works.

General admission to MOCA is free courtesy of Carolyn Clark Powers.

All screenings are free with advance reservations. Tickets for each screening will be released on a rolling basis and become available up to 21 days in advance. MOCA Members enjoy early access to ticketing reservations.


MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator with Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.

Additional support is provided by and