Maya Gurantz

The bible but with clowns.

In 2013, a woman’s last known movements were captured by elevator surveillance. Released by the LAPD to identify her body, this footage quickly exploded online into thousands of conspiracy theories, becoming fodder for horror and true crime exploitation. "3 for E.L." explores Elisa Lam’s unsolved death by dismantling the tired tropes used to tell her story, translating the elevator footage in three different ways: as physical re-enactment; as a speculative POV journey cutting between memory and hallucination; and an immersive fugue state in found footage.

Operating as a massive multimedia séance to allow history to bleed though the architecture and haunt public space, the pieces that make up “Ghosting Atlanta” unsettle our assumptions about the streets and spaces we take for granted. The series invites Atlanta to experience the diverse histories that make the city what it is today.

Deipnophoroi, a sequence of short two-channel videos, explores how mothers prepare their children for the unutterable, translating into contemporary language and anxieties an ancient Greek ritual, the Oschophoria, in which women (deipnophoroi, or “food-bringers”) re-enacted comforting their children with stories before sending them to the Minotaur and a certainly horrible fate.

Experimental video art pieces. Each a single choreographic move. The body’s interaction with tasks in the built environment—buying groceries, doing the dishes, changing a lightbulb.

Inspired by the characters of the raconteuses in the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and the extinct pornographic literary form of the whore’s dialogue, this piece is an immersive multi-channel video installation that enacts a ritual of the transmission, through language and the expertise of performance, of sexual knowledge between women.