Jenny Perlin

Bunker investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, and follows the process of building and selling these structures to the wealthy and not-so-wealthy alike.

Perlin's whimsical hand-drawn animation is based on a 16th-century treatise on mining instruments. Taking inspiration from her time in the VivosX bunker complex in South Dakota, Each thing its place is a compact, chromatic journey underground.

A portrait of a Texas-based company that sells, constructs, and installs custom-made, secure steel subterranean hideouts. A trip to one of their newly completed bunkers reveals a fortified underground world for the wealthy to retreat from global crises.

Brooklyn, 4 July 2004. Jenny Perlin spends her entire Independence Day filming her neighbourhood supermarket. Although the front of the building is dilapidated and the sign is so old you can barely read it, this shop has everything a larger supermarket has, "and sometimes even more," according to its proud owner Mr. Leem. He and his brother work 14-hour days in the supermarket. In an off-screen interview, he tells about the shop's history and about his favourite music: Johnny Cash and Najwa Karam. Every two hours, Perlin grabbed her 16 mm Bolex camera to shoot two and a half minutes of film (the time it takes for the spool to unwind). This "arbitrary" style of filmmaking emphasises not the action, but the rhythm. The beauty of the shop is not in the extraordinary events taking place there, but in the fixed patterns of plodding and rummaging.

Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two eighteenth century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, 'The Measures' explores the metric system's origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of politic and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.

The great whirlpool arrives and sucks everything into its center, spitting out only fragments and noises. The shoreline is in view, but unreachable. The maelstrom pulls us under.

A silent hand-drawn animation. It presents a history of inventors who tried to create color organs—instruments that emit color rather than sound. It’s tinted according to a scale invented by Louis Bertrand Castel (1688–1757), a French mathematician who first tried to build the device.

Secret messages are present in the receipts you hold in your wallet right now. The codes, however, can't be cracked. Infrared is a light wave past the visible spectrum, just after red, invisible to the human eye. In 1800, physicist and astronomer Sir William Herschel accidentally discovered infrared while conducting experiments with a prism and a thermometer. Hands describing, constructing, arranging. Spontaneous creations, untranslatable texts. These hands see what is invisible to me.