Clarissa Tossin, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, 2022. Video Still. Commissioned by Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer (EMPAC). Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

MOCA Artist Film Series: Clarissa Tossin
Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, 2022, 64 min.
West Coast premiere
Thursday, May 18, 2023
6pm
MOCA Grand Ave
Free with RSVP

MOCA Artist Film series is an active and dynamic platform for the presentation of artist films. Inspired by film and video works in MOCA’s renowned collection, the series will offer engaging and notable screenings and live programs with MOCA collection artists and beyond. With presentations in the Ahmanson Auditorium, screenings and Q&As will feature artists, historians, and critics in dialogue with special focus on experiments in long-form, narrative or feature-length films. Centered in the cinema capital of the world, these programs will explore the critical issues of our time and our place. 

MOCA presents a screening of Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing followed by a conversation with artists Clarissa Tossin and Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal.

The film undertakes a richly sensory journey across moments, languages, and music, roaming through architectural spaces that are variously imagined and real, cosmological and colonized. Commissioned by EMPAC in 2019 and developed through a series of on-site and remote residencies taken by the artist, the moving image work centers on the capacity of Maya cultural belongings, and wind instruments in particular, to give voice to Indigenous systems of knowledge. The narrative is formed through the personal histories of its Maya protagonists including K’iche’-Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez; Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal who is filmed inside the Mayan Revival-style Sowden House in Los Angeles; Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta. The film score and sound design is composed by Michelle Agnes Magalhães.

Clarissa Tossin has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2022); La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2021); Moody Center for the Arts, Brochstein Pavilion, Rice University, Houston (2021); Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge (2019); and Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2018); and featured in notable group exhibitions including the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2020); Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); Made in L.A. at the  Hammer Museum (2014). Tossin is the recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. 

A multidisciplinary Ixhil (Ixil) Mayan creator, Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal lives in the neighborhood Pachappa name Cahuilla in Riverside, California. He studied Archeology at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala. Dimensioning historical and personal aspects, art is his anchor that connects him in the past and present. Exile marked his way of seeing time-space, which led him to explore alternate temporalities of Mayan philosophies. In engravings, sculptures, texts, performances, exploratory symbolic language, he alludes to fire as a means of communication and entity, making use of the epigraphy and iconography of the Mesoamerican area to engage in an aesthetic dialogue.

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Brian Dang, Programming Coordinator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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