Crystal Z Campbell
Directing
Biography
Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of African American, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness informs their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and writing. Honors and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award; MAP Fund; MacDowell; MAAA, Skowhegan; Rijksakademie; Whitney ISP; Franklin Furnace; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Black Spatial Relics, and Flaherty Film Seminar, amongst others. Selec exhibitions include the Drawing Center (US), Nest (NL), ICA-Philadelphia (US), REDCAT (US), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Project Row Houses (US), and SculptureCenter (US), and SFMOMA (US). Campbell’s writing has been featured in World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021) living and working in Oklahoma. Campbell is founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com.
Known For
A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a hybrid of an African ritual, an autobiographical anecdote, and a modern riff of a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Go-Rilla Means War derives from a decayed 35mm film discovered in the abandoned Slave Theatre, once the center of Black culture and civil rights organizing in Brooklyn. Featuring Black men in various states of martial arts training, the film's faded and discolored frames are a metonym for the media demonization of Black bodies in the context of the gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Go-Rilla Means War
An exhalation of social and architectural failures under the guise of possible futures.
Futures for Failures
Filmed entirely in Swedish spa town, VIEWFINDER takes cues from political gestures, and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments.
Viewfinder
Flourishing Black townships of Oklahoma in the 1920’s––an archival record of communities in exile, awash in colors deemed “impossible."
FLIGHT
On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth is a historical remix of the New York Times newspaper printed during the New York City Blackout in 1977. The 1977 Blackout is unofficially credited with the formal birth of hip-hop, a movement that was already well underway but advanced with equipment looted during the riots.
On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth
A sonic meditation on the camera as a witness and the so-called ‘landscape of violence.’ 8mm
Witness
Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
CURRENCY (2019) is a sound film of refusal––a woman wears bygone forms of currency on the tips of her hair while preserving the greatest currency for herself.
Currency
An archive of pareidolia (a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist) narrated by a descendent of Exodusters.