MOCA Store Presents
Poetry of Fire: Chromatic Experimentation in the Films of Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Staff
Film Screening, Discussion, and Book Signing
Sunday, April 6, 2025
MOCA Grand Avenue – Ahmanson Auditorium
Free with RSVP
3–6pm

MOCA Store and Del Vaz Projects presents Poetry of Fire, a screening of moving-image works by the artists Ana Mendieta (1946–1985), Derek Jarman (1942–1994), and P. Staff (b. 1987), all of whom are the subject of the current exhibition Earthshaker—on view at Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica through April 19, 2025. As an extension of the work in the exhibition, this screening considers how each artist applies chromatic, temporal, and technological manipulations to Super 8, 16mm, and video footage to visualize an alchemical fusion between the earth and body. The group screening will be followed by a conversation with artist P. Staff, Jay Ezra Nayssan, the Founder and Chief Curator of Del Vaz Projects, and Chrissie Iles, the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Afterward, there will be a book signing for Del Vaz Projects’ recent publication on Earthshaker, featuring essays by Eva Hayward, McKenzie Wark, and Maxi Wallenhorst.

Ana Mendieta (b. Havana, Cuba, 1948; d. New York, New York, 1985) was an artist whose brief, groundbreaking career spanned drawing, film, photography, sculpture, site-specific installation, and video. Mendieta studied painting and intermedia at the University of Iowa, where she received an MA in 1972 and MFA in 1977. Conjuring her own experiences of political asylum in the United States after she was forcibly relocated from Cuba at the age of twelve, her work investigates exile, displacement, disembodiment, and a return to the landscape—themes with potent, enduring resonance in today’s geopolitical climate. These ideas are echoed and expanded across a vast archive of her photographs, drawings, sculptures, and Super 8 films—preserved by the artist’s estate, Galerie Lelong & Co, and Alison Jacques, London.

Derek Jarman (b. Northwood, Middlesex, England, 1942; d. London, England, 1994) was a visionary filmmaker, writer, painter, gardener, designer, and a vocal AIDS and queer rights activist. He studied English and Fine Art  at King’s College London and Theater Design at  the Slade School of Art in the 1960s. Following his production design for Ken Russell’s film The Devils (1971), he became an independent filmmaker in his own right, producing some of the most experimental and political films of his time. Jarman was an influential figure in the late 1970s and 1980s cultural underground that challenged Margaret Thatcher’s conservative, anti-queer politics. In every medium, Jarman infused his creative practice with explicit and imaginative depictions of the ecstasy and melancholy of queer life in the late twentieth century. On December 22, 1986, Jarman was diagnosed with HIV and discussed his condition in public, epitomized in his film, Blue (1993). His illness prompted his move to Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, where he resided until the end of his life, cultivating a world-renowned garden on desolate land near a nuclear power station. 

P. Staff (b. UK, 1987) is an artist living and working between London and Los Angeles. Staff received their BA from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2009, and participated in the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London, in 2011. Exploring the intersection of film, installation, and poetry, Staff ’s interdisciplinary practice weaves phenomena, materials, and settings to dissect wide-ranging themes, including bio– and necropolitics, trans poetics, astrology, dance and end-of-life care. Throughout their work permeates a fascination with how bodies—particularly those of people who are queer, trans, or disabled—are interpreted, regulated, and disciplined in a violent, surveilled society, offering a multisensory investigations into the fractured reflection between body and earth wherein politicized bodies undergo dysphoria and alienation in a sociologically and chemically toxic climate.

Chrissie Iles is the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Her extensive scholarship and writing on Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Staff include exhibitions and texts such as “Ana Mendieta: Subtle Bodies” in the catalog for Ana Mendieta: Earth Body Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985 at the Whitney in 2004, for which Iles was organizing curator; catalog essays for Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty at the Serpentine Galleries (2008), and Derek Jarman: Protest! at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019) and  Manchester Art Gallery (2021); and 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than The Real Thing, co-curated by Iles and Meg Onli, which featured P. Staff’s work.

Jay Ezra Nayssan is an Iranian-American writer, curator, and the founder of Del Vaz Projects, an arts nonprofit based in Los Angeles, California. Beginning in 2014 as an alternative exhibition space located in Nayssan’s home—and accredited as a 501(c)(3) in 2021—Del Vaz Projects has expanded over the last decade into a curatorial platform, research collective, independent press, and artist production fund. Earthshaker, Del Vaz Projects’ current exhibition—and the subject of their most recent art book—places artists Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Staff in a dialogue to explore alchemical fusions of the body and earth across geographies, generations, and gender expressions. In addition to Del Vaz Projects’ programming, Nayssan has organized exhibitions and programs for various galleries and institutions, including the inaugural series of off-site projects for Frieze Los Angeles in 2023, Nonmemory at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles in 2023–2024, and Getty Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide in 2024. 

Del Vaz Projects is a non-profit art space based in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 2014 by Jay Ezra Nayssan in a home-turned-artists space in Santa Monica—and accredited as a 501(c)(3) in 2021—Del Vaz Projects mounts exhibitions, produces publications, and stages programs centering visual art, performance work, and moving-image media. Named after the Persian phrase دست و دلباز (dæst ō del bāz), meaning openhanded and openhearted, our approach is intentional, relational, and resourceful. We collaborate with artists across generations and geographies to manifest projects in our space and throughout our city’s cultural and historical institutions—with each endeavor, infusing diverse environments with a sense of collective intimacy, intellectual inquiry, and expressive invention.